Stormwater Research Trip

It was the perfect rainy day to study what was happening
with stormwater in each of the actual research spaces.
Here students go to look at what is happening as the stormwater
travels through the layers of the soil and which
pollutants are removed through filtration.

Last week some of our student Green Team Leaders had the opportunity for a day of learning at the WSU Stormwater Research Center in Puyallup.  We had a great day with students from elementary, middle, junior high and high school!  Here is a post from one of our middle school students.

Learning about stormwater was a great experience and I want to teach and inspire other kids at my school about how important stormwater is and what you can do to solve storm water problems. Our mission is to reduce impacts of stormwater on streams, lakes, wetlands, and coastal areas through effective research-based application of green stormwater infrastructure. Stormwater is water that runs off roofs and roads that can affect how rivers and streams look and the life in them. Some ways to prevent stormwater is to have a green roof to soak up water, a rain water collecting system, having multiple rain gardens, and having permeable concrete so there is no standing water that can flow and flood rivers and lakes that have living organisms in them. Stormwater is a big issue in the world we just need to have solutions to prevent it and a team that can inspire others and work together to understand the science if stormwater.”

Thanks so much to Brody for this Post!

More details on the Green Globe Award

Example of the Up-Cycled Products - 3 ring binder
pencil holders that are made from recycled chip bags.
Points earned from the award can be turned in for products like these.   

Congratulations again to Liz White's class at Shadow Lake Elementary and their impressive work with the Green Globe Awards.

The team received official notification of their award today.  As the Green Globe winner for BOTH the Engaging Your Community and What Makes Your Location Unique Categories the students will be receiving a unique, upcycled TerraCycle Green Globe and 100,000 TerraCycle points.  Additionally, although you were the only submission for How You Hosted an Event, TerraCycle will be rewarding them with the Green Globe and the 50,000 points since the students put so much effort into all their videos.

So the SLES students will be rewarded with THREE Green Globes and 150,000 bonus TerraCycle points! Congratulations!  In a direct quote from TerraCycle "That is quite an impressive accomplishment."

Green Globes are Announced - SLES Wins!

The Green Globe winners were announced last week and SLES has won in two categories!  Five teams from Liz White's elementary class created and submitted videos to The TerraCycle Green Globe Awards in February to answer the questions: 

• Why do you TerraCycle? 
• What makes your site unique? 
• How Do You Engage Your Community? 
• How Do You Store, Ship and Collect for TerraCycle? and 
• How Do You Host a TerraCycle Event? 

Two of their videos were nominated to the Green Globe Finals where the votes of their Shadow Lake and Maple Valley supporters gave them the most votes in two categories and helped them earn two Green Globes Awards! One of the teams was the only one in the country to tackle the last question above, so they will earn a special award or product bundle from TerraCycle.   Lot's of learning for our SLES students with fun and a recognition award to top things off.  

Congratulations to all the Sustainability Learners 

in Mrs. White's class! 

SLES Videos Compete for Prize!

Check out the great videos that our Shadow Lake students made in competition for the TerraCycle Green Globes.   These are 100% the work of our students.  Great job to our Shadow Lake story tellers!   They took the challenge to be a TerraCycle star and highlight a garbage recycling lifestyle to share with others.  There were two categories our students entered.  

Category I:  How do you engage your community to collect for TerraCycle?

Category II:  What makes your TerraCycle collection location unique?

Awards will be announced on March 8th.  Watch here for an update on how our Golden Globe finalists fare.

Shadow Lake Student Explains Waste Free Wednesdays

Do you know what waste free Wednesday is? Well, it’s when you have no garbage in your lunch every Wednesday. To have a lunch with no waste, you need to know what to you can bring. It is much better for the environment if you have a lunch with no products that go in the landfill. Finally, you might get prizes if you take an environmentally friendly lunch.

            

To start, I will tell you what you could bring in your lunch. You could take leftovers in a thermos, such as pasta, soup, rice, etc. Any type of fruit or vegetables could be put in reusable containers. Put your sandwich in a reusable bag or container. Last, desserts need to go in containers as well. Remember, no single- serve packages or plastic bags. Now, you know how to pack a waste free lunch!

           

In addition, you reduce the amount of garbage that goes in the landfill if you pack an environmentally friendly lunch! Only bring products that go in the compost or the recycling as well as reusable products (TerraCycle included.) Every time most students in your school bring no waste in their lunch only a ¼ of a garbage bag is filled instead of ½ to a whole bag being used. On top of that, almost every school in the Tahoma School District participates which helps the environment even more.

            

When you bring a waste free lunch you could earn a prize. If you take a lunch with no garbage, put your raffle ticket in the drawing box. If your name gets pulled at the end of the year, you will get a product made by TerraCycle!

            

All in all, waste-free Wednesday is an excellent way to help the environment. You know what to bring, the garbage size is reduced with your help, and you may get a prize for participating. Now that you know about waste-free Wednesday, do your part to help out the earth.

Thanks so much to Stirling at SLES for this blog post!

            

TSHS Waste Free Wednesdays

TAHOMA -  NO WASTE WEDNESDAYS

The Sustainability Ambassadors at Tahoma High School, also known as the green team, will be launching Waste Free Wednesdays at the high school this Wednesday, February 6^th. Waste Free Wednesdays is where we encourage students and staff to be waste free (reuse, compost or recycle) for a whole day in order to reduce our school’s amount of waste. This activity can take place anywhere, such as the classroom, the lunchroom, and home! Our outreach efforts will first target the lunch room. Students and staff will be encouraged to bring a waste free lunch every Wednesday. Those who bring a lunch will be entered in to a raffle for a monthly drawing. Each month there will be one winner from each lunch, winners will receive prizes such as gift cards and products from local stores.  Our school participation will ultimately save the school money, time, and energy as well as save the environment by reducing the amount of waste sent to the landfill and resources made for our consumption.

Re-usable Lunchboxes

There are many easy ways to approach a waste free lunch. One way is to bring lunch in a re-usable container and a refreshing drink in a re-usable water bottle! This way, your lunch box and water bottle can be used multiple times without having to throw away anything. Re-usable lunch boxes and water bottles are available at any local grocery store, or for a unique option, re-usable bento lunch boxes are available on the Laptop Lunches website. Bringing your own lunch is the most sustainable option, however, we understand that some students like the convenience of a school lunch. We have been working with the lunch staff to offer more waste free menu options on Wednesdays and exploring more ways to make our lunch room waste free. Much of the students stores packaging is compostable, another step towards waste free!

Remembering to reduce the use of paper during school hours is also important. Staff and students may contribute to this by re-using papers on the back side or printing copies on both sides for assignments. Teachers may also save unused papers in their classroom for students. By encouraging these practices students and staff can reduce their amount of waste significantly.

The high school is not alone in this action, the whole school district is participating in Waste Free Wednesdays. Each green team at each school across the district is working to reduce waste, together we are reaching 16,000 people through our efforts. By selecting a day to remind students and staff to reduce their amount of waste, we are raising awareness of waste free practices. Through this, these practices will naturally become habits for our school and our whole district. Eventually our efforts will spread out into the community by partnering with local businesses to promote waste free practices. Waste Free Wednesday is taking waste free ideas to the next level, and improving our ecological footprint as a school district through collaborative efforts.  

Thanks to Sustainability Ambassadors Leader,  Kylin for this post!

Sustainability Leaders

We had the opportunity for some wonderful sharing and learning at the E3 Sustainability Conference on Friday.  Unfortunately, we are right at the end of the semester and finals are upon us at all our secondary schools so our teacher leaders and most of our student leaders were unable to attend.  We were so fortunate that our high school student president of the Sustainability Ambassadors was able to arrange her schedule to attend!  Cassandra was the only student in attendance in a huge room of adults and we can be so proud of her poise, confidence, and knowledge as she shared about the work happening in our system and specifically some of what is happening at our high school.

In the morning session, Peter Senge, shared key elements to effective collaboration and what it takes to move together in changing a system.  In his presentation he talked about the importance of paying attention to three key elements for effective collaboration:  

• convening
• conversation
• community building.  

It was powerful for me to have the chance to listen to Cassandra as she shared her insights and takeaways from Peter's presentation.  It certainly highlighted that we are truly supporting learning at a deep level in our system for students.  It also caused some dissonance as she shared that some of these concepts would make  a big difference to support the thinking of our student leaders as they engage with their teams back at school.  Our Sustainability Ambassadors are working to effect change on a large scale - difficult change at the level of everyday habitual behavior for adults and students.  Do we turn off the lights when leaving a room? Do we throw something in the garbage, recycle, or compost?   Is a purchasing decision made based on sustainable options? Struggling with mental models like,  "Is being "green" nerdy?"

This challenged me to think about whether we need to revisit our definitions (indicators) of effective collaboration.  How might we better support learning for our student leaders?  We are learning much in the work we are doing with our teacher leaders and administrators in our system.  Are we applying that learning to what we do with students?  In my position in Teaching and Learning I know the answer to that is a little but most of what we are learning is not yet embedded in learning for students.  I have new insights into some of the work we could be doing to position our students to not only be amazing learners, but also to give them a skill set to be even more effective as both a member and possibly a leader in teams that are working to effect change.  

Awesome day and so many opportunities for Tahoma to help illustrate how this is coming alive in our system.  Thanks to our administrators, staff, and student for the amazing work happening in each of our schools and with each of our teams, both at the organization learning level as well as our sustainability curriculum, student leadership and operational practices.

Post by Dawn Wakeley, Teaching and Learning