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Written by Doug Horner
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Friday, 04 December 2009 21:39 |
Calgary students go to work making their schools more sustainable.
This past fall, a pioneering environmental movement with an international reach challenged local junior high students to imagine a greener future for their schools.
Kurt Archer, founder and director of My World My Choice, says these kids are at a pivotal age. They are young enough to still be forming a sense of themselves and the world around them but old enough to make a real difference in the communities they belong to, says Archer.
Grade 8 students from Banded Peak School in Bragg Creek have an ambitious plan for their school's future when it comes to sustainability.
Photo: Doug Horner/Calgary Journal
My World My Choice began in 2008 in Bangalore, India, when a group of Canadian travelers tried to find a way to connect with the local community. A plan was hatched to engage students in environmental projects that would benefit their local communities. The program attracted over 600 students who created and implemented 10 innovative projects.
The experience inspired Archer to try something similar when he returned home. He began organizing the project in January and proposed the idea to schools at the beginning of the summer. The Canadian edition of My World My Choice officially rolled out this fall in both Calgary and Guelph, Ont.
In September, 25 volunteer mentors were selected, who began working with over 300 students from A.E. Cross, Banded Peak, Harold Panabaker, St. James, and Tsuu T’ina junior high schools. Mentors met with their student groups on a weekly basis. They functioned primarily as a resource while the students were encouraged to create and implement their own ideas.
“In general our objective was to get role models out in the community working with these kids and have them create amazing projects,” Archer said. “I think we achieved that one hundred percent.”
On the evening of Nov. 26, all the participating schools met up in the gymnasium at A.E. Cross Junior High School for an awards ceremony and the chance to share their projects. Sandwiched between a presentation on recycling and another about electricity conservation, four Grade 8 students from Banded Peak School in Bragg Creek huddled behind a model building with green grass glued to its roof.
The model might have been small but the ideas behind Operation Green Roof were big. Robyn Betts, Nathan Stelfox, Elisabeth Dillabough and Annemarie Schiemann, had hatched a plan to transform the roof of their school into a field of grass.
Betts got the idea for the design when she saw the Canadian War Museum while on a field trip to Ottawa.
The students explained that although a green roof is expensive to build, it would save the school money by reducing heating costs during the winter and cooling costs during the summer.
“Cold in, hot out,” said Sheimann, “and then in the winter hot in, cold out.”
“So it’s good both ways,” confirmed Stelfox.
Students were eager to explain their ideas to anyone who would listen; their enthusiasm didn’t diminish regardless of how many times they repeated their presentations. A project like this is powerful because it gives students the chance to make an impact on their own schools, said Craig Churchill, a science teacher from Banded Peak School.
“They buy into it more if they know as a 13- or 14-year-old, they can actually implement a change in a school or a school division. It gives them the feeling that they can do something in the future,” Churchill said.
Another team from Banded Peak won an award that night. The winning project proposed selling the school’s recyclables to Terracycle, where the company would then transform the waste materials into things the school could use like pencil cases, lunch boxes or backpacks.
My World My Choice was a catalyst for getting young students to not only learn about the environment but to also put that knowledge to work.
“I think that sustainable means that the environment can actually keep up with us,” Stelfox said. “Like we aren’t outrunning it.”
“Like we’re not trashing the whole world, so that nothing can grow back,” Betts said.
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