11-Point Green Checklist for Schools

Queen Elizabeth II greets students from Damers First School in Poundbury, England, which is one of the greenest schools in the world.

 
11-Point Green Checklist for Schools
Written by Natalie Pace and Edd Moore.
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With a special shout-out to former Damers Head Teacher Catherine Smith, who is now with The Harmony Project. Catherine always found a way to support sustainability, including making room in the site plan for a kitchen, where the children can cook food they've grown and eggs they've gathered in their hen house.
 
There are so many upsides to going green at school. The students will be more engaged, and eat healthier food. Many schools can save hundreds of thousands of dollars annually, which can go for enhancing the curriculum, such as adding instruments and a music program, and other resources that make learning more fun. Some schools create and sell sustainable products to raise funds for their next green goal. The children at Damers First School in Poundbury, England used proceeds from their compost and Waxtastic No Plastic product to put in a pond and nature area.
 
Even better, there are organizations that have already done the heavy lifting of creating standards-based curriculum, crowdsourcing funding and showing that all of the green tips below can be achieved over a carefully-crafted multi-year plan.
 
Below is the 11-Point Green Checklist for Schools
 
1.     School Garden
2.     Nature Area
3.     Healthy, Local and Organic Food
4.     Plastic Free
5.     Recycled Paper
6.     #NoExcuseForSingleUse
7.     Composting
8.     Energy Audit: Energy Efficiency, Human Behavior
9.     Walk or Bike to School
10.  Integrating Sustainability Throughout the Curriculum
11.  Solar Power?
 
And here is more information on each point.
 
School Garden
School gardens offer hands-on study that can span the spectrum, from science and math, to cooking and language arts. Kids who grow their own vegetables like eating them. While touring The Edible Schoolyard in Berkeley, California, my middle school guide confessed that her favorite thing to eat was kale pesto! Dr. Sherridan Ross, a co-founder of Compton Community Garden, loves telling the story of a kid who gathered up a t-shirt full of peas to take home with him after sampling one that he was initially unwilling to stick in his mouth. Green Our Planet’s student-run farmer’s market is the largest in the nation, and raised over $22,000 in 2023!
 
Nature Area
Does your school have a carpet of grass, or is it xeriscaped with native plants? Green Our Planet taps county funds to eliminate grass in Las Vegas schools, and then uses the proceeds to set up student gardens. According to Ciara Byrne, the co-CEO and co-founder of Green Our Planet, over 50 million gallons of water is being saved each year by 200 schools in the area.

Native plants offer important biodiversity lessons in science that fly off the page. Will butterflies visit your native milkweed plants?

Identifying native wildflowers and trees is important for children. In learning about nature, they also learn from nature. Year 1 Damers First School students recorded what they discovered from their own Nature Area using a Nature Journal, documenting what they found in drawings, notes and “I wonder” questions. They then used this knowledge to teach their family and friends about what they found in other places around their community. Students also took guests on a tour of the grounds naming and giving facts about what was growing. This was all part of the Nature Premium Trial by the Harmony Project to encourage children to get out into nature. Damers First School was given £1000 to use as part of this project. The findings will be shared with U.K. The Department of Education with the view that all schools across England will get funding to help children get out into nature. 

Healthy, Local and Organic Food
Are you concerned about the nutritional value of your child’s lunch? After ripping up concrete to set up permaculture gardens, Chef Alice Waters, the founder of The Edible Schoolyard, donated recipes that the kids use to cook their own food. While transitioning from heat-and-serve meals that are served on disposable plates will require more than planting a garden, your child’s health is worth the attention, activism and diligence of your PTA.
 
Plastic Free
I joke that the most powerful green lobby in England is the 4-9-year-olds at Damers First School in Poundbury, England. Through letter writing to the companies that deliver their food (language arts skills), the students were successful in getting their food delivered without all of the excess plastic covering. Watch the Damers video at YouTube.com/@EarthGratitude, if you’d like to learn more about the awards and stellar success that Damers has had with its Green Checklist.
 
After getting rid of more than 90% of the plastic at their own school, they went out into the community to convince business leaders to do the same. Tom Amery, the CEO of Brace of Butchers, was inspired by the students to create Naked Brace, a shop that sells bulk goods and produce, including milk that is dispensed in your own reusable glass bottle, without plastic.
 
Recycled Paper
The NRDC has graded toilet paper companies in the below Report Card.

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Using recycled toilet paper is important to preserving our forests and trees (which are some of the best and only CO2 drawdown machines we’ve currently got). Schools go through a lot of paper, which should be recycled at the point of purchase and after use.
 
#NoExcuseForSingleUse
Less than 9% of plastic gets recycled. In the U.K., over 16 billion single use paper cups are disposed of each year. That means 6.5 million trees are razed, 4 billion gallons of water is wasted and enough energy to power 54,000 homes has to be drained. Globally, the total is estimated to be a staggering 500 billion cups that are used and tossed annually. Middle and high schoolers should know these facts. Elementary school students (and all of us) should know that there is no excuse for single use. 

Composting
Food thrown in the garbage ends up as methane in a landfill – a gas more harmful than CO2. Compost is not just green, as in sustainable. It can also raise funds for the school. Whether your school establishes a Compost Row, like The Edible Schoolyard (click to watch a short instructional video), or purchases a compost machine like Poundbury has, there’s a lot to learn and a lot to gain by turning food scraps into a soil enricher that can be used in the Student Garden, in addition to the gardens of the parents, teachers and administrators at the school.

Energy Audit: Energy Efficiency, Human Behavior
School energy auditors use STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) when they are educating everyone about best energy practices, and holding them accountable. Optimistic, fun and informative signage can also encourage students to do the right thing. Auditors can identify areas to improve every day sustainability, in the quest for saving money, becoming more energy efficient, and getting closer to net zero.
 
11-year-old Isla Lester (a former student of Edd Moore, the eco coordinator at Damers First School) has become such a respected green youth leader that she opened Earth Day in Poundbury, heads up her own school Waste Warriors eco-club, is the U.K. Ambassador for Funky Kids Radio in Australia, and has been featured on BBC Bite Size Radio. Students that join eco clubs, volunteer to be energy auditors and grow, harvest and prepare their own food and meals become the sustainability experts of tomorrow, while gaining confidence and improving their health.
 
Walk or Bike to School
Many students live within walking distance of their local school. Are parents taking advantage of that? The health benefits are profound and important, particularly since obesity has become a crisis in America, with 20% of students obese (and 42% of adults). Additionally, 28% of CO2 emissions come from transportation. So, getting kids out of the car (and the dreaded carpool lineup) and onto their bikes and scooters is a triple win for the planet, the family budget (less gas expenditures), and personal health.
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Integrating Sustainability Throughout the Curriculum
Creating greater harmony with our home planet is a theme that can weave throughout all of the school curriculum. The Harmony Project, which is based out of the U.K., offers teacher training and standards-based curriculum, with the aim of “putting sustainability and Nature at the heart of learning.”

Solar Power?
If you live in a sunny place, then consider powering your school with solar. Electricity is expensive and is only going to get more so. The sun has been offering power at the same price for millennia. With the low price of solar panels and the benefit of government incentives, the payback time on solar can be as low as 4-7 years. Thereafter all of the money that would have made the utility company rich can now benefit the teachers and students.
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Resources
There are free ebooks, videos and other resources at EarthGratitude.org. Many of the organizations mentioned in this blog offer outstanding models for your school to adopt.

Bottom Line

If:

* Ron Finley and Compton Community Garden can create Eden in a food desert,
* Kids at the Edible Schoolyard can grow, cook and delight in their own kale pesto (Alice Waters’ recipe!),
* Damers First School students can eliminate plastic in their school and community, compost their food waste, harvest apples from their trees, build a nature area and power with solar and anaerobic digestion,

Imagine what is possible in your neighborhood!
 
Edd Moore and I will be hosting a free videoconference on these 11 Green Tips for Schools on Thursday Sept. 14 at 3 pm ET (noon PT). If you’d like to join us live, email [email protected] with VIDEOCON in the subject line. You can watch it back at https://www.youtube.com/nataliepace and https://youtube.com/@earthgratitude.
 
Feel free to reach out to our team at [email protected] if you’d like me to speak to your PTA about this School Green Checklist. Please be sure to put School Green Checklist in the subject line. Edd Moore is also available for private consultations. You can reach him directly at any of the ways listed below.
 
Get to Net Zero with Edd Moore https://www.facebook.com/GettoNetZero/
Edd Moore LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/edd-moore-a0369b86
Email: [email protected]

Edd Moore has been at the forefront of education around environment and sustainability for the last eleven years. He has built up the Primary School’s eco work from a blank canvas to one of the top Eco Schools in the country embedding the environment into the school’s curriculum. Edd has led the school he has worked for to win multiple national environment awards that include Eco Schools Eco Primary School of the Year, Surfers Against Sewage Schools Champion of the Year, and Jane Goodall’s Roots & Shoots UK Best Group of the Year, to name a few. Edd was one of 500 people to be named as a King Charles III Coronation Champion for his environmental work.

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Natalie Wynne Pace is an Advocate for Sustainability, Financial Literacy & Women's Empowerment. Natalie is the bestselling author of The Power of 8 Billion: It's Up to Us and is the co-creator of the Earth Gratitude Project. She has been ranked as a No. 1 stock picker, above over 835 A-list pundits, by an independent tracking agency (TipsTraders). Her book The ABCs of Money remained at or near the #1 Investing Basics e-book on Amazon for over 3 years (in its vertical), with over 120,000 downloads and a mean 5-star ranking. The 5th edition of The ABCs of Money and the 2nd edition of Put Your Money Where Your Heart Is were released in 2021.
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