Learning Gets a Green Face

The girls have also started a dialogue with the corner coffee shop, where, Willensky says, “everyone basically lives.” In meetings with the owner, they have been discussing the amount of packaging and materials that are used there. The club hopes to come to an agreement with the shop to reduce the environmental impact of Nightingale students stopping by for breakfast or snacks.

Daily actions are the times when people forget about the environment or have trouble giving up parts of their routines, says Marilina Kim, a Spanish teacher at the high school who works with the Earth Club. “Not just educating but breaking habits can be a little hard,” she says. Teachers can make students think about the world and give them tools for sustainability, but ultimately the students choose how to use them.

The school’s curriculum will include an environmental science elective starting in the fall of this year—even though adding an elective is a major undertaking for a small school that needs to find a qualified teacher and enough students to make the class work.

Nightingale is just one school of over 120,000 in the nation, and it’s difficult to measure how far outside the walls of the school these efforts will resonate. But the thousands of schools that change daily habits or the structure of their buildings or the classes they offer have garnered more support and enthusiasm as the green schools movement becomes more organic and more common.

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The “A Watch” group has left the Harbor School’s borrowed field trip boat and moved to a pavilion by the East River. A chill is setting in from the damp day, and the students are not as active as they had been with their binoculars, clipboards and cameras on the boat. Still, there is work to be done with the buckets of water and instruments arranged in front of them.

“Can I do the temperatures?” asks Agueda Marcelaino.

“Can I do D.O.?” Overby pipes up a few minutes later.

The kids throw terms like D.O. (dissolved oxygen), pH, turbidity and salinity around with ease.

In pairs, they stand up to do the turbidity, or water murkiness, tests. One student has to hold a long cylindrical tube straight up while a partner pours water into it. Once it’s full, he bends down and loosens a clamp, releasing water through a hose from the bottom of the tube. Meanwhile, the first teammate presses his eye against the opening at the top of the tube and watches until he sees an X appear at the bottom. Stop! The clamp goes back on, and the students read a number from the side of the tube that tells them how turbid the water is.

They look like mini-experts. Except, of course, they’re still kids—they “accidentally” splash water while pouring it into the tube and “accidentally” spray the unclamped hose onto each other’s shoes. It’s okay, though, because they walk away from their field day knowing what makes water appealing for animals to live in and how industries along Newtown Creek have affected the water quality.

The first graduates from the Harbor School almost tripled the typical 23 percent graduation rate of the old Bushwick High School, the bigger school that was split to form this school and two others. This year, Fisher expects 79 percent of the class to walk by the end of summer classes. The number of kids who went into water-related careers, he says, is icing on the cake. After all, the bottom line of a school with an environmental theme remains the same as for any school—educating children.

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A teacher in NYC uses a community garden to give students a green thumb.