2018 2019 Secondary Sustainability Grants · The sustainability projects identified by students...
Transcript of 2018 2019 Secondary Sustainability Grants · The sustainability projects identified by students...
School Theme Project Description
Britannia Sustainability Education Meatless Monday Campaign
Churchill & Ideal Mini Active Transportation Bike to School Week Event
Foundation (Killarney) Resource Conservation – Waste & Water
Access to water and reusable water containers
Gladstone Green Spaces School garden & greenhouse improvements
John Oliver Resource Conservation – Waste
J&O Upcycling – community clothing swap
King George Resource Conservation – Waste
Reusable to-go cups
Magee Resource Conservation – Waste
Soft plastic recycling programming
Prince of Wales Green Spaces Re-establish school garden
Prince of Wales Sustainability Education Sustainability Week event
Templeton Active Transportation Increase bike parking
David Thompson Sustainability Education Grow Your Own Green Team
Total Education (Eric Hamber) Resource Conservation – Waste
Improved recycling program
Tupper Resource Conservation – Waste
Improved waste and recycling awareness
University Hill Green Spaces Roof-top garden improvements
University Hill Sustainability Education Environmental Awareness Week
University Transition Program Green Spaces Wildlife habitat enhancement
Vancouver Learning Network Sustainability Education Sustainability awareness & seed giveaway at Car-Free Day
Windermere Green Spaces Aquaponics System
2018-2019 Secondary Sustainability Grants
Launched in the fall of 2018, Secondary School Sustainability Grants of up to $1000 were available to every VSB secondary
school. Covering everything from fashion upcycling to reusable cups, plastic recycling to active transportation, VSB students are
tackling the environmental sustainability challenges facing the world today. Students worked collaboratively with their peers,
teachers, and school support staff to improve sustainability for their school and for the wider community.
The sustainability projects identified by students give us great insight into the most pressing issues facing schools and students,
and also help to see what kinds of solutions might work across the district. The majority of projects addressed the issue of recy-
cling awareness, and students put on awareness campaigns for their peers, piloted new recycling diversion programs, and en-
couraged their fellow students to consume less and reuse more!
Please keep reading t o learn more about the projects undertaken this year.
2018-2019 Secondary Sustainability Grant Reports
Prince of Wales Garden
We asked Earth Bites to teach us about the garden, its maintenance and how to have a more productive season. We started
out planning the garden with the feet method, breaking the beds into blocks and planting different plants within these blocks.
We learned about perennial plants, how to plant properly, when the beds need filling up and even a new perspective on how
to water the beds. Many of our meeting were also spent on moving and mixing the new fertile dirt that Earth Bites provided us
with. Earth Bites helped teach us how to repair each piece of equipment, what new equipment to buy and how to organize our
tool shed. Each Wednesday we would have 2 hours meetings with students from the school to plan, plant and work in the gar-
den. We are planning a large harvest feast at the end of the year to encourage more participants. We also hope to have a har-
vest of honey with the bees that we host from East Van Bees, rejuvenate our apple trees and learn more about how to main-
tain them properly and help them grow. Not only is the garden looking very productive, but we’ve also learned a lot during the
process.
Prince of Wales Sustainability Club
We hosted a sustainability awareness week, full of activities to increase student awareness of sustainability practices and to
promote simple things student can do to start their journey of becoming a responsible citizen.
Tuesday - Friday: Class vs class recycling competition - In 1-3 classes, students are encouraged to bring their old/unusable pens/markers, electronics, plastic bags, and fabric. Students will be able to fill their classroom boxes all week, and the class that collects the most recycling will win a class pizza party!
Tuesday: Zero-waste lunch day - Pack your own waste free lunch or bring your container to the cafeteria, show us in the cafe-teria at lunch to win a prize and a chance to win a $25 Patagonia gift card!
Wednesday: Influential people in sustainability panel - Join us at lunch in the library to hear first-hand experiences and stories from professionals who are making our city greener.
Thursday: Make your own t-shirt bag day - Bring an old t-shirt and join us at lunch in the cafeteria to learn how to make your own upcycled t-shirt bag!
Total Education Green Gurus
The Green Gurus have made some headway in terms of managing the large and diverse amount of waste coming into our school, but certainly we’ve got a lot more work to do. We set up a “Responsible Disposal Site” after seeing the packaging from our lunch program wasn’t being recycled properly, everything from full milk and mayonnaise containers to soiled cardboard containers from pasta salad, etc., being put into the blue bins. Green Chair Recycling visited our school in March and provided us with a dynamic, interactive and fun presentation about best recycling practices which not only worked to make people aware of where to put what, but also inspired us to take all of our plastic milk con-tainers and use them as pots for propagating seeds.
Our garden is still in the fledgling stages of being developed, sod being turned, lumber being purchased. Our feeling is that once our garden boxes are in place we will contact Cedar Creek Enterprises to establish our three bin system, slated for September 2019. Next year we’re excited about educating our population about com-posting and further emphasizing the necessity of responsible dis-posal of garbage. It’s a big job, but somebody has to do it! We're committed to showing the way such that all Total Education students can be sustainability stewards.
University Transition Program Sustainability Club
Since February, the Sustainability Club at the University Transition Pro-gram has been busy buying, building, and setting up bee hives. The Sus-tainability Grant for our program ($500) allowed us to purchase from Home Depot, six commercial bee houses, planting soil, planters and seeds and bulbs. After doing some background research, and discussing how to proceed by contacting the head curator Entomologist for the UBC Beaty Museum, we learned that the bee homes that were purchased needed to be modified in order to avoid pests such as wasps and other parasites.
20 students gathered and began to modify the bee homes to cater solely to the bees. In addition to changing the bee hives, we also germinated plants in our school garden to attract the bees to the hotels. Subsequent-ly, we went on a search for the perfect place to put one of these homes around UBC and found an ideal tree along Marine Drive where the bee house would face south and was surrounded by flowering plants. This sustainability grant allowed us to partner with other organizations and could allow for current sustainable actions to continue for years to come. As a community, we will continue to visit and asses the effectiveness of our Bee houses at UBC in subsequent years. Our sustainability group hopes that the sustainability grant will help Vancouver take small steps towards saving our environment.
University Hill Secondary Environmental Awareness Week
The organization Protect Our Winters sent three elite ski ambassadors to deliver a presentation about climate change. Students presented a video capturing UHill’s current waste practices, and ways we can reduce our personal waste output. During Awareness Week student leaders and volunteers ran four separate stations raising awareness through different modes. Participating students signed up to be eligible for eco-healthy prizes. Staff and students signed up for a personal pledge for 1 week that was publicly posted and we drew prizes and had conversations with students about their pledges. Slightly over 100 people pledged. Rolled out writing utensil recycling bins throughout the school. Plans for the future: set up a Super Station to educate students in real-time over lunch hour of how to dispose of their waste
University Hill is fortunate in that it
has a rooftop area for gardening.
Over the past several years, the
rooftop planters have been home to
spring bulbs and summer vegetables.
While the bulbs have grown well, the
shorter flowers cannot always be
seen from inside the school, and the
vegetables have at times not fared
well in the garden due to its VERY hot
growing conditions and strong winds.
This year the Garden Club decided to
explore how well the succulent varie-
ty of plants would grow under these
conditions and looked to creating a
year-round garden that could be
viewed from the inside of the school
as well as from the roof.
University Hill Secondary Succulent
Templeton Environment Club
We determined that Templeton had a need to increase the number of availa-ble spaces for bike parking, as we are a large commuter school with students biking to school all year round. We found it was a bit of a process to get new bike racks but worked out very well in the end and were able to more than double our current capacity.
We worked with the maintenance department to rearrange our existing racks and create a new bike rack area by out flag pole. The bike racks were immediately used, however, they were also a mismatch of colors … blue and grey and rusty as well. So we worked with the VSB paint department to get the racks painted. They look great and now that the weather is good, they are filled every day.
Next year we will have a big event for Bike To Work Week.
King George Earth Club
With the City of Vancouver looking to ban the use of single use cups and straws by 2019 our students want to lead this charge by changing student habits. The main focus of their project is to order and issue stu-dent designed re-useable cups for every student and staff in the school. Through education and public service type announcements in school, our environmental leaders hope to empower personal responsibility. The student body will be educated to see the importance of taking the time to clean their mugs and use them to their favorite spot and to con-sider bringing their own clean containers for takeout.
We also worked with a local artist, K.A Colorado, to create an art piece highlighting the issue of climate change and giving students of many classes in the school a unique opportunity to think critically about the issue and have their words place on the artwork which now resides in our school.
Britannia Green Club
We initiated a Meatless Monday program at school to raise
awareness about the importance of going meatless and the dire
impacts meat production has on our environment such as how
much water is used and how much greenhouse gases are pro-
duced. Consuming less meat and meat products is a healthy
choice and a humane one as well to support animal wellbeing.
Going meatless to a more sustainable plant-based diet at
least one day each week is a powerful way for each of us to
reduce our carbon footprint. Our green club has set up booths,
handed out vegan food samples, and created media to promote
the importance of going meatless and how it can benefit every-
one on a local and global scale!
Windermere Garden Club
This year, the garden club worked with UBC Land and Food system stu-
dents to help rebuild our school’s aquaponics system that combines the
use of hydroponics and fish. The project was a great success as the aqua-
ponics system is running well and is a great educational piece to talk about
closed-looped systems, sustainability, and the nitrogen cycle. In addition,
science classes were involved in creating educational resources for teach-
ers so that more classes would be able to use the aquaponics system as a
learning tool.
In addition to our aquaponics system, the garden club also worked with the
cafeteria class to plan a community long table dinner to celebrate our gar-
den space and the power of food in creating community. The dinner will
feature a 3 course vegetarian meal featuring produce from our garden and
a local supplier. The dinner is planned for June 7th, and we have close to 50
people who will be attending including staff, students, parent advisory
committee, and community members.
David Thompson Green Team
The David Thompson Green Team was able to host our annual Grow
Your Own Green Team Conference on for 62 elementary school children
from Fleming, Waverley, and Tecumseh elementary schools. The event
featured fun activities for kids from grades 1-6. The group was split up
into two. The first group was given a presentation on how to upcycle old
objects and make other uses out of them. The children participants used
old CD’s and bottle caps to make colourful spin top toys. The second
group were given a tour of the garden and viewed different types of
plants while also learning about composting. The children experienced
the operation of our industrial size composter and saw our process of
making compost on school grounds.
This year we also invited three guest speakers from environmentally
focused non-profits and small businesses to host workshops with our
Green Team youth leaders during the lunch hour: Fresh Roots, The Soap
Dispensary, and The Wilderness Committee.
Vancouver Learning Network
The efforts of the student voice group at VLN came to fruition on Sunday, at Car-Free Day Main Street, where they had a
stall, and handed out packages of seeds free in return for sustainability pledges. The seeds are native BC wild flowers and
food plants.
Do you have your own story of sustainability success? Share your
stories, ideas, or concerns with us at [email protected]
More sustainability grant reports to come…