Blogg-Ed Indetermination

Several years ago, NAIS president Patrick Bassett described a wonderful “multidimensional definition of school sustainability,” including finances, curriculum, demographics, global networking, and the environment. This multidimensional definition of sustainability is an important and helpful model for thinking holistically about school’s sustainability, and I recommend it as a construct for such discussions.

Yet for many people the meaning of the term “sustainability” is still restricted to environmental sustainability in general, and global climate change in particular.

For years many schools have silently practiced aspects of environmental sustainability in the form of conservation’s three-r’s (reduce, re-use, recycle) and through environmental and outdoor education programs. But to many of us it is clear that we must do more than “pick the low hanging fruit” of energy and materials conservation, or mark Earth Day each April with special programs. Rather, we must make significant changes in how we operate our schools and teach our children if we are to truly reduce our environmental footprint and to help students adopt behaviors and attitudes consistent with a sustainable future.

Fortunately, there are many resources available to assist schools in reaching these goals, and many schools have or are creating programs that can be models for the rest of us to learn from and emulate. One such organization is the Green School Alliance, whose logo is depicted here, and I am proud to say that my school is a charter member.

Another useful construct for thinking about your school is to consider three aspects to green initiatives: greening your school’s operations, its curriculum, and its culture.

Greening School Operations

The problems associated with global climate change may seem overwhelming, and the contributions of each of our schools to solving them insignificant. It is imperative to guard against any feelings of helplessness that may occur as you learn more about these issues. (Righteous anger is justified, if it leads to righteous action.) It is especially critical to help students look to the future with a realistic sense of optimism. This is why it is useful to have programs that provide a means for students to take action, and I think that school operations represent the easiest place for this to first occur. Getting students involved in conducting audits of your waste and recycling stream, for example, can not only provide valuable information to the school but can be the springboard for wonderful curricular connections.

A more formal approach to addressing school operations exists in the form of “green business” certification programs, often sponsored by your local county or municipal government, to assist local businesses in assessing and improving their current environmental practices. For example, Castilleja School in Palo Alto, CA is turned to its Santa Clara County government for such a program. Not only was the program of no cost to to them, but it provided them with thousands of dollars worth of consulting assistance in such areas as solid waste reduction, recycling, composting, energy efficiency, toxic chemicals abatement, water use, landscaping, and food service. The goverment also provided to them, again at no cost, replacements for more efficient water and bathroom fixtures.

Greening the Curriculum

Many schools have faculty who are deeply committed environmentalists, and as such bring ideas about sustainability into their classroom in both informal and formal ways:

• Distributing handouts, collecting homework, and correcting student work electronically.
• Providing recharging stations for batteries used in student calculators and computers.
• Modeling conservation by turning off lights when leaving a room, printing on two sides of the page, re-using the blank back sides of printouts for scratch paper, and so on.
• Facilitating age-appropriate discussions of global climate change in their classrooms or advisories.
• Using opportunities to connect sustainability to their subject area, such as measuring and graphing the school’s power and water consumption, writing persuasive essays on environmental topics, reading the great works of fiction, poetry or essays with environmental themes, or expressing a love of the earth through photography, movie making, sculpture, painting and drawing, dance, and music.
• Engaging students in discussions about scarcity (something most children in the U.S. have little first hand experience with), social and environmental justice, and their own economic choices.
• Performing community service projects such as tree planting, coastal and waterways cleanup, creating and tending a school vegetable garden, or helping senior citizens replace incandescent light bulbs with compact fluorescent bulbs.

Greening the School Culture

Creating a culture of sustainability is challenging, particularly if it has not been core to the school’s mission or habits. Indeed, environmental sustainability can appear to be at odds with other school values:

• Your Development office prides itself in the high quality of its print materials used to communicate with parents and donors. Moving to electronic means of communication may seem less personal, and printing on recycled paper using soy-based inks may be more costly.
• Your parent organization is responsible for a number of school events. Getting them to use ceramic plates and cups and cloth napkins instead of disposable paper products may mean more work for the volunteers.
• Your board of trustees may perceive purchasing carbon offset certificates for your utility use and travel as an unnecessary expense rather than as an investment in a clean future.
• Your school lunch program runs on a tight budget. Purchasing locally grown, organic food may be more costly, and using more seasonal fruits and vegetables may require changes in their menus and food preparation practices.
• Your student and athletic uniforms are a big part of your heritage and identity. Switching to fabrics that are organically grown may be difficult, and assuring that the workers in manufacturing plants where the uniforms are created are properly compensated and work in safe conditions may be difficult to validate.

Changes in school culture seldom occur quickly, and require buy-in from the community and persistence on the part of school leaders. Formalizing your goals for sustainability in documents such as the school’s long-range plan, regional or national accreditation goals, and the school mission statement are a means to demonstrate commitment and help to keep environmental sustainability in your community’s eye. Creating connections with other schools and universities, environmental groups, business organizations, media outlets, and local government can also provide you with resources to bolster your efforts to raise awareness, celebrate and publicize your successes, and learn about programs that can assist your efforts.

First Steps

Given the complexities involved in all of these issues it may be difficult to decide where to start. But this very complexity means that there is no “right” place to begin. Rather than getting mired in “analysis-paralysis,” simply start doing. Whether it’s water conservation, reducing landfill-bound waste, the use of environmentally friendly cleaners, pesticides, and herbicides, planting trees and native plants, purchasing carbon credits, creating “green teams” of faculty, staff, and students, or installing solar panels does not matter. These are all great projects and contribute to a sustainable future for your school and our planet. And with action comes hope, and with hope comes a new habit of mind that, ultimately, is the only way that we can save ourselves, and our planet.

I have written before about the wonderful book, Disrupting Class, by Clayton Christensen, et al. The book seems to be making the rounds in the blogosphere, and its three authors are appearing in interviews and web casts

This is a good thing. The book deserves a wide readership and, even more importantly, deep discussions amongst school leaders. Thus it was that I was excited to tune in to last week’s EdTech Talk with during which the book was discussed with Patrick Bassett, President of the National Association of Independent Schools.

(Full disclaimer: I work for an independent school that is a member of NAIS).

Bassett is one of the most wired and savvy education executives I know and therefore I was not surprised that he has not only read Disrupting Class, but he understands and embraces the implications of the authors’ assertions regarding the future of education.

It may be even more surprising that Pat represents a sector of education that many people many believe represents the ivy walls, tradition, and conservatism. But Bassett is not that that kind of leader. Indeed, he is recommending Disrupting Class as recommended reading to all NAIS members and believes it critical that we engage in thoughtful discussions at all levels within our organizations. He believes that NAIS schools have a leadership responsibility to help define future schools along five themes of sustainability, and that programmatic sustainability requires schools to change to reflect 21st century practices such as those discussed in Disrupting Class.

Listen to Bassett’s remarks: www.edtechtalk.com/21cl_88