Learning Gets a Green Face

One grade level up from Calhoun’s anti-idlers, students take care of some robust eaters that help the school reduce food waste. A box containing orange peels and other food scraps mixed with newspaper strips lies in each fourth grade section. Red worms munch on the contents to turn the food waste into compost.

A lot of kids didn’t want to go near the worms at first, says Sylvia Kopec, Calhoun’s director of Administrative Services, as she adds lettuce to the boxes, but now they reach their hands inside to touch them. Worm sculptures, worm biology lessons, a worm song and a worm video have sprung out of the composting project. The fourth graders plan to donate the rich material the worms create to a seventh-grade terrace garden.

Kopec added to her own responsibilities by asking to become the school’s Sustainability Director, a clearinghouse role for environmental project ideas that come from students, parents and faculty. Now she evaluates the proposals and tries to make them happen at the progressive school of about 725 students. Calhoun’s students and staff are selling reusable shopping bags, cleaning up beaches with the Surfrider Foundation and cleaning their smaller building, for preschool through first grade, with only green products.

Parents contribute to the greening of the school, too. Calhoun’s pièce de résistance, a green roof, came from a parent’s design. A square patch of grass caps the school building with herbs sprouting and flowers blooming. Students use the organic herbs in an after-school cooking club with the cafeteria staff. Large pots await fruit trees that will add to the quiet retreat used in biology classes.

But it is more than an educational tool. The roof reduces storm water runoff by 40 percent, insulates the building to lower heating and cooling costs (important in a city that measures about 5 degrees hotter in summer than surrounding areas), gives a high-up home for wildlife and filters the air and rainwater by absorbing carbon dioxide and pollutants. Calhoun, the first educational institution in New York City with an eco-friendly roof, plans to increase science study on the roof and possibly install solar panels as an educational tool in the future.

Green buildings are becoming a popular way for schools to reduce utility costs and their environmental footprints. The U.S. Green Building Council’s Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, program (the green building design standard) registers new schools at a rate of one per day. New York City’s Department of Education now requires that all new school construction complies with LEED standards, which means about 100 buildings over the next few years will follow green guidelines.

In the fall, Calhoun will host an open house sponsored by Green Schools Alliance for other schools to learn about the green roof.

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The Nightingale-Bamford School, another member of the Alliance, has its own array of environmental initiatives across town. The small school has switched to silverware and reusable cups instead of disposable, sensory lights and automatic hand dryers in bathrooms, all green cleaning products and 100 percent alternative energy.

The school also participates in energy curtailment, which means they reduce energy in small spurts and re-route whatever energy they save to other places. They earned $8,000 last year from selling unused energy to other consumers.

On the student level, an Earth Club spreads the word to classmates and younger students about ways they can green their lives. One of the co-founders of the club, Regina Willensky, used her senior project as an opportunity to change her life so she could impact the environment as little as possible.

For four weeks this spring, she started each morning by walking down the 29 flights of stairs from her apartment and continuing the 60 blocks to school. She ate only foods grown within 100 miles of New York City to avoid energy used in transportation and used the least amount of water and electricity possible. Through a blog she challenged her peers to get greener.

Willensky and the Earth Club have been trying to show all the girls that small efforts can make a big difference. With bake sales and other fundraisers, Nightingale has contributed to conserving a coral reef and funded the planting of 600 trees in areas afflicted by Hurricane Katrina. They’ve started an e-waste drive, collecting ink cartridges and other recyclable electronic objects that earn money for the school.

Encouragement and some light peer pressure do the trick, too. “My biggest pet peeve is reusable mugs and people who don’t use them,” says Willensky. She took on the project of converting her friends by stressing that a Styrofoam or plastic coffee cup used for 10 minutes will stay on Earth for hundreds of years.