From my home base in Berkeley I am systematically visiting green schools in Northern California to document best practices.  Here are the schools I have visited thus far, in order of appearance: 1. Marin Country Day School, 2. Prospect Sierra School, 3. Castilleja School, 4. Marin Academy.

1. Marin Country Day School: An Inspirational Environmental Community

 Nearly a decade ago I served on the Board of Trustees of the Marin Country Day School, and I was eager to return and see how the school had grown.  Arriving on a brisk December morning to a warm and enthusiastic welcome from Head of School Lucinda Lee Katz and Board member Adam Willner, my former student at University High School in San Francisco, I was quickly reminded that MCDS is a remarkable school.   It is full of 550 engaged K-8 students, and teachers and parents who live the School’s mission that “inspires children to love learning…..nurtures a deep senses of respect and responsibility….and challenges them to envision and work toward a better world.”  In the course of my morning, it also became clear that since my time on the Board, MCDS has embraced and implemented a vision of environmental sustainability that is inspirational.

Green School Visits—The South

My visits to schools in the "south" includes several in Washington DC.  Here they are in order visited: 1. St. Stephen's and St. Agnes School, 2. Sidwell Friends School, 3. Charlotte Country Day School

1.  St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School:  Environmental Awakening

Just days before I visited St. Stephen’s and St. Agnes School (SSSAS), an Episcopal co-ed day school of 1100 students in Alexandria, Virginia, in mid-November, the school had finished hosting its third annual Students for Sustainability conference, or S4S, which the Washington Post called an “environmental awakening.”  The gathering, which drew students from all over Washington DC, Maryland and Virginia, featured presentations on topics from the importance of beekeeping to solar power and from composting to electric cars.  The event symbolizes the key critical role of students can play in the greening of a school.

“Create, Cultivate, Coordinate:  Designing our Shared Future”: New England Environmental Education Alliance Annual Meeting (NEEEA),  Fairlee, Vermont, October 21-22, 2010

The 44th annual meeting of the New England Environmental Education Alliance (NEEEA) brought together over 250 educators, practitioners and environmental activists in a beautiful retreat center at Lake Morey in Fairlee, Vermont for three days of inspiring keynote addresses, informative workshops, and constructive networking.  This is one of the longest running environmental regional groups in the country, and their successful affiliation has been a result of several key factors: New England has had a long reverence for the land, expressed in art, literature, and many outdoor clubs and organizations; the area has developed an unusually large number of non-profit groups devoted to nurturing the environment; the land itself has regained its natural, forested canopy that paints the hills in stunning fall colors and beautiful greens; there are several local universities—University of Vermont, University of New Hampshire, and Antioch University New England--that have developed programs to train environmental educators; and the area has given us national leaders in the environmental movement.

The Green Schools Express                                    October 2010

This year as part of my effort to learn about the environmental movement in our nation’s schools, I will be visiting roughly fifty schools and a number of local, regional and national conferences across the country. Encouraged by my friends at the National Association of Independent Schools, especially Vice President Jefferson Burnett,  the Center for Ecoliteracy and the Green Schools Initiative in Berkeley, Sustainable Schools in Massachusetts, and colleagues in schools nationwide, I have identified some of the leading schools in an effort to document best practices in environmental sustainability programs.