Oct 30
Jaimie Cloud at DA workshop, August 2022. Photo by Melody Butts.
Last week I had a coaching session with Jaimie Cloud, who is advising DA about our curriculum and culture for sustainability. Our conversation was helpful on multiple fronts, but one detail particularly stuck with me. Jaimie mentioned the widely quoted finding that there will be more plastic than fish in the ocean by 2050. For her, it’s a perfect example of what NOT to teach. Continue reading
Oct 25
When the students in last year’s Environmental Sustainability class made a pitch to the Administrative Team, they asked that DA make a public commitment to sustainability. The Innovation Journey Grant is enabling us to move toward such a commitment for both operations and curriculum. In the meantime, however, the Sustainability Leadership Team took up the challenge of articulating a definition and vision, since, after all, a journey is less confusing if the destination is clear. With input from the administration, we composed a statement.
Sustainability means stewarding all resources so that consumption does not prevent or exceed replenishment.
Our school thrives today because it has sustainably managed its financial and human resources over the 90 years of its existence. We recognize a need to extend this approach to include the natural environment. Guided by its mission to prepare students to live moral, happy, and productive lives, Durham Academy now turns to developing a more balanced relationship between the school and the natural systems on which it relies. We seek to reduce and eventually eliminate our contributions to climate change and biodiversity loss, thereby becoming a model of good environmental stewardship. We will do so by educating all constituents, fostering creative problem-solving, and acting with awareness of our inescapable interdependence.
Oct 23
On Wednesday, October 18th, Upper School Sustainability Committee members, Sanju Patel, Lia Paisley, Riley Casey, Rinal Dahhan, and Maya Patel, came to the Preschool to teach the kindergarteners about composting. They gave an informative presentation and taught the children a great rule about what materials can be composted: if something was once alive, it is compostable.
The Sustainability Club Members then split up and went with individual kindergarten classes back to their rooms. Each class played a fun and engaging game in which the composting bucket, recycling basket, or trash can were placed in different corners of the room. Kindergarteners were assigned to be banana peels, napkins, candy wrappers, and other items. They had to decide on the proper receptacle and move to that corner of the room. It was a wonderful and educational time!
Next week, the Sustainability Committee will address the Lower School at an assembly.
Sep 28
By Ann Leininger, DA Parents Council Sustainability Liaison
Following the lead of the Middle School, parents in charge of the athletics concession stand near the tennis courts set up a waste management station to help customers minimize the waste that goes to landfills. Gatorade bottles, pizza boxes, snack packages, and plastic film (from the cases of soda and Gatorade) have the potential to generate a significant amount of waste! But the parents adopted the system of fifth grade science teacher Dr. Shebalin and her students, who have set up waste stations with separate containers for recyclables, compostables, plastic film, snack wrappers and trash. Each container has a sign to indicate what goes inside it. The station at the concession stand was set up in time for Alumni Weekend events at the Upper School. Other trash and recycling containers were moved out of the area so that people had to go to the waste management station to dispose of their waste. Sustainability Committee students were on hand to help with sorting.
The waste management station was well used by all in attendance. Looking ahead, we hope to establish these waste management stations throughout the Upper School campus.
Sep 19
The Preschool faculty is embracing sustainability, even when it comes to sustenance. At the Preschool’s back-to-school faculty meeting this August, our Director, Christian Hairston-Randleman, gave all the teachers culinary kits and water bottles. She did this to actively support the sustainability initiative at Durham Academy.
Each TOPBOOC culinary kit contains a metal fork, spoon, knife, straws, chopsticks and a cleaning brush. So, rather than ordering large boxes of plastic silverware as we have in the past, we will only have a few “emergency” supplies for students who have forgotten their utensils for lunch. Also, the large, metal water bottles have reduced the need to order single-use plastic water bottles.
Kindergarten teachers Mrs. Whilden, Mrs. Nuernberger, Mrs. Hanks, and Ms. Parry are showing off their culinary commitment to sustainability.
Aug 31
Each year, Durham Academy kicks off our return to school with discussions of summer reading. Most folks think that summer reading remains a student experience, working through an assigned text to be ready to discuss it in first week English classes, but faculty and staff do summer reading, too! Usually we pick a focus for our reading, choose from a series of texts and meet during the week of opening meetings to have book club-style conversations. And we have fun doing it.
To help kick off the 2022-23 sustainability focus for DA, our summer reading was all about climate change, land use, environmental activism, dietary choices, activism, and most importantly, hope. We hoped to do what we do best: look at sustainability from the perspective of education. How could we learn more?
Continue readingAug 17
I have long read Seth Godin’s writings; each day, Seth sends me a message to my inbox with his thought for the day. Over the summer, I read about his work with the crew working on the book and website The Carbon Almanac. I have been reading a lot of books lately about Climate Change. The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells, The New Climate Wars by Michael E. Mann, The World Without Us by Alan Weisman, and I chose The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert for this summer’s faculty discussion book.
I am a farmer and old enough to have celebrated the first Earth Day when still in high school. I thought of myself as a good steward of the land and planet. I do my part with how I live my life, and yet when I heard my then thirteen-year-old granddaughter explain that teenagers are so depressed because they know the world is going to end, I was and still am sad and confused about how we ended up here.
Continue readingAug 16
What does it mean to Educate for Sustainability? On August 9th and 10th, 2022, DA faculty and staff, upper school students, and parents, welcomed Jaimie Cloud of the Cloud Institute for Sustainable Education to lead us in answering this question for ourselves.
While many folks anticipated hearing the refrains of “compost to reduce food waste”, or “reduce, reuse, recycle”, we were instead led in a more encompassing experience: exploring how schools can foster a sense of agency amongst all community members and can motivate learning and action in service of long term sustainability goals.
The first activity involved a “fishing” simulation in a pool of finite resources. Jaimie led us to reflect afterward on the mental models that governed our choices as we competed, or unsuccessfully collaborated, with others to harvest from this “commons.” We realized that focusing on individual coping strategies, and thinking of ourselves as separate from ecosystems, resulted in failure.
Continue readingAug 06
SustainABLE DA, fueld by an Innovation Journey grant, launches August 9-10
with forty-five teachers, administrators, staff members, Parents Council representatives, and Upper School student leaders working together in Horton Hall to create a shared vision. The effort is being led by Jaimie Cloud, who has been fostering Education for Sustainability (EfS) in public and private schools since 1995. As we consider how to incorporate sustainability into our curriculum and culture, we are building on recent work in Diversity, Equity, and Engagement. Both initiatives involve examining assumptions and practices, and many of the foundational concepts (such as “We are all in this together”) are the same. Sustainability also connects to the Wellness Program at DA as we pursue a healthy and livable future for our students.
In addition to the conceptual work, we will get practical.
Green Places, a Raleigh-based firm, will guide us through a process of evaluating our operations and infrastructure. The Sustainability Leadership Team and Upper School students, especially those in the Environmental Sustainability in Action course, will gather data on electricity, water, transportation, waste, refrigerants, travel, etc. Green Places will lead the analysis. By winter, we expect to be able to share our total institutional greenhouse gas emissions and their sources. From there, we will work with the Board of Trustees and the Administrative Team to develop goals for reduction, define metrics, and begin adjusting our operations and practices.
Through this Innovation Journey, Durham Academy will align its actions more closely with its values. We will prepare our students to be leaders as we strive as an institution to be a leader in the field of sustainability. Our mission to prepare students for a moral, happy, and productive life will take on a new dimension of care for the natural context of that life. Through this journey, DA will educate all constituents, cultivate student creativity, and demonstrate solutions in our curriculum, operations and culture.
For more information, see the full grant proposal here.
Denise Shaw (PS faculty)
Tracy Riddle (LS faculty)
Theresa Shebalin (MS faculty)
Karl Schaefer (MS faculty)
Andrea Caruso (US faculty)
Kathy Pierce (MS Administrative Assistant)
Ann Leininger (Parents Council)
Sanju Patel (US student)
Tina Bessias (Sustainability Coordinator)
Please comment below or contact any of the team members!
Jul 29
Instructor: Tina Bessias, DA Sustainability Coordinator and Independent Study Coordinator
Students in this course will be at the center of Durham Academy’s transition to environmental sustainability. Whether you are new to sustainability or an experienced leader, you will grow your knowledge base and develop skills that are much in demand as the whole world turns away from unsustainable practices.
Here are some questions the course will address:
In answering the last question, we will work with Green Places, a Raleigh-based startup that we have engaged through a grant from the Innovation Journey Fund. They will help us gather and analyze data about energy use, waste production, transportation, etc.
Contact Ms. Bessias to share ideas or ask questions!
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