Oct 25

What We Mean by Sustainability

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.

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A Definition and Vision for Sustainability at Durham Academy

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

Kindergarteners Learn Composting

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.

High School students speak in kindergarten assemblyThe 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

How low can we go? Reducing trash at concessions stand

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

Preschool Faculty Embraces Sustainability

Jessica Whilden, Sloan Nuernberger, Lori Hanks, Elizabeth Parry

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

Faculty Summer Readings on Sustainability Theme

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 reading

Aug 17

Change Your Search – Plant Trees

The Carbon Almanac Book Cover
A book, website, and movement.

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 reading

Aug 16

We’re all in this together!

Lessons from the Educating for Sustainability workshop

Jaimie Cloud leading discussion

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 reading

Aug 06

An Innovation Journey begins…

Cloud Institute logoSustainABLE 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.

Green Places logoIn 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.

Some student perspectives

Fitting it all together

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.

Who is the Sustainability Leadership Team?

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)

What are your hopes for DA’s Journey to Sustainability?

Please comment below or contact any of the team members!

Jul 29

Coming soon to a classroom near you!

DA Upper School elective course, fall 2022

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:

  • How and when did human life become unsustainable?
  • What communities are most affected?
  • What countries, organizations, and schools are working effectively to improve?
  • What are DA’s carbon emissions, and how can they be reduced?

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!

Jul 19

Summer Camp Goes Green

By Sanju Patel ’23 and Miller Roessler ’24

This summer, Miller Roessler and I have partnered with the Evergreen Summer Camp, DA’s all day summer camp for kids ages 4 through 13. Our goal was to develop curriculum about sustainability for the campers, as well as running the compost program at summer camp. Miller and I both worked at summer camp the year before, so we were excited to get to work. We felt that instituting this curriculum was right in line with our recent conversations with the administrative team about including more sustainability in DA curriculum, which has culminated in the assigned reading for teachers this summer. With this in mind, Miller was tasked with creating curriculum for the summer, while I worked out how to bring compost to DA Summer. 

Compost

child's drawing

Compost was a huge emphasis of the US Sustainability Committee in the past school year. We are thrilled with how it is going in the Upper School, though we’re still trying to catch up to the Middle School! Our next step was to bring that to success the Lower School and DA Summer. After determining that we would be able to have 4 compost bins at the Lower School over the summer, we chose to have compost start out in four locations: outside the camp store, outside the hock building, out front of the lower school, and back behind the lower school. We informed the rest of the staff of our plan, and most of the staff knew the basics about compost. We felt comfortable they would be able to explain how to compost to their campers, and after speaking with CompostNow to iron out the drop off and pick up of the bins, we felt ready for camp to begin. We did a small skit at morning meeting to introduce composting to the campers. However, we didn’t expect that lunch would be allowed to be eaten inside, since we started camp with an indoor mask mandate. That changed just as camp began, and the first week saw less composting than we had hoped for. Putting some bins indoors near the campers’ lunch areas brought significant improvement, and the bins started to fill up. Hopefully, we see even more composting in the last weeks of summer.

Curricululum

Diving into curriculum was a big task! We had no experience with teaching before, and trying to create lessons that kids from all ages could understand was a challenge. We struggled to highlight specific sustainability topics in the beginning with the limited resources we had, but once we did some more exploring into the large variety of books about sustainability, we came up with some exciting lesson plans. For example, in week two, we read a book called Ms. Fox’s Class Goes Green and created posters that advocated for being more sustainable.

child's poster about not littering

In the next three weeks, we will do some more inspiring lessons, like learning about shared resources and finding out what plants need to survive. 

We are so excited for how this summer has gone, and we are so grateful for Ms. Kantz for encouraging us to make Summer Camp more sustainable. Special thanks to Lucy Steiner and Talbot Waters for their work to make the camp store more sustainable, and to Ms. Mack for helping us with the lesson plans. We have learned a lot, and we can’t wait to improve these next few weeks and next summer.