Going back to schools that teach

Today is back to school day in our house, and among all the normal activities...finishing summer reading, making sure uniforms fit, figuring out which lunch table to sit at...it's a good time to consider the importance of school buildings to our community, and ways that we can make them even more important.

In many communities, schools already hum from early in the morning until late in the evening. Students go to class, of course, but community groups use facilities for meetings, local youth groups maximize the use of athletic and fine arts facilities when the school does not need them, and in extreme circumstances, schools provide shelter to those displaced from their homes. Schools provide an excellent foundation for sustainable communities, and we have many ways to make them even more so.

• Preserve schools located in community centers. For the past couple of decades, many communities have pushed their schools to the edge of their community because of a combination of the low cost for the land and the larger footprint that modern schools take up. This removes the ability for students to walk or bike to school, as well as losing the embodied energy of the existing school buildings.
• Use the buying power of the school to encourage the purchasing of local, healthy food options. This supports local food systems that provide community resilience, and directly benefits the health and learning opportunities of the students.
• Leverage the long-term position of the school to enter into long-term agreements for energy efficiency and renewable energy. Utility-scale renewable energy provides environmental benefits, but local, community-based systems provide the added benefit of a self-sufficiency that helps in emergency situations. As an added benefit, schools tend to be out of session during the times of highest system performance, meaning that they can export the additional energy to local homes.
• Manage materials in such a way as to minimize how much we dispose of in landfill. Schools use many consumable materials, and have a large, often passionate workforce to help collect and manage materials.
• Create a generation of sustainability natives. Just as children born over the last 20 years are digital natives that have never known a world without computers, students today will never live in a world without the impacts of climate change. These students can then bring what they learn into the community to make life better for all.

One in five people spend some part of their day in a school. The lessons we learn there permeate to all aspects of our life. In order to make these school buildings as useful to our communities as possible, we all need to advocate and support efforts to reduce or eliminate their negative impact on the environment and make them even more self-sufficient.