It’s Easy Teaching

Clubs and classes promote environmental stewardship

CCOnCERn FOR THE environment starts young in Dublin City Schools.

Caring for the environment can be a passion and a science, and teachers are doing what they can to encourage their students to pursue both.

At Scottish Corners Elementary School, recycling lunch waste has become second nature. A few years ago, kids from Roots & Shoots (now called Earth Club), stood beside the line of trash and recycling bins at every meal to remind their peers which items go where.

Liquids are dumped through a mesh strainer into an unlined trash bin. Food that can be composted is scraped into another bin. Recyclable items such as plastic bottles and cardboard juice boxes are fixed to the top of a third bin, a physical reminder of what should go inside. Anything left over goes into the trash bin.

“We recycle every possible thing, and the last container is the one that should be the emptiest,” says fifth grade teacher Stacey Brunst, who leads the Earth Club along with fellow teacher Lisa Brintlinger.

Roots & Shoots was started several years ago by retired music teacher Jenny Bowman, who brought the Jane Goodall Institute program to Scottish Corners. When Bowman left at the end of 2011, Brunst and Brintlinger kept the club’s focus, but did away with the Goodall affiliation.

Each month, 30-40 first- throughfifth graders get together and work on a project. In February, in line with the theme of love for the earth, they wrote letters of recognition or thank-yous to community members who keep Dublin clean, such as the district groundskeepers and city forestry division.

“Each meeting has its own goal and purpose,” Brunst says. “I’m sure we’ll do some type of Earth Day activity in April.”

Among the past projects was a collection of tennis shoes. Shoes in good shape were donated to those in need. The ones that couldn’t be re-worn were recycled into playground surface. And usually, there’s at least one service day each year.

It’s been amazing to see how much students’ attitudes toward the earth have changed since Brunst was in elementary school, she says.

“When I was in school, the green movement wasn’t such a big thing. Now students all pretty much have their lunches in reusable bags,” she says. “It’s something they’re just used to now. It’s not necessarily a movement; it’s just their lifestyle.”

The science aspects of conservation and ecology aren’t lost on students, either. Science teacher Chuck Crawford says 44 percent of Dublin Jerome High School students graduate high school with five or more science credits – and that number is still rising.

“We try to create opportunities to explore the areas they want to explore, and environmental science is growing in popularity,” Crawford says.

In the International Baccalaureate environmental science class, students test the CO2 emission levels from different types of fuel. Many of the students in the niche science class have participated in other green energy projects. Senior Kyler Johnson was part of a group that played a part in the installation of a solar thermal water heating system on the roof at Jerome.

“It was actually really cool to be involved with the contractor who did it,” Johnson says. “We worked on some of the physical aspects of it, like finding ways to optimize the angle of the (solar) panel.”

The district initiated the project, and selected Jerome in part because of the support from both teachers and students, Crawford says. A few years ago, all three high schools created proposals that considered the pros and cons of converting the district’s bus fleet to be fueled with biodiesel.

But beyond the hands-on projects, the biggest benefit of training students in the sciences is teaching critical thinking skills, Crawford says.

“In this day and age where environmental concerns are at the forefront of so many decisions, they should at least be able to say, ‘What are the tradeoffs?’ because there’s always a tradeoff,” he says.