Back in June, Assistant Head of Finance and Administration Nicole Simard-Laurin and I attended the NAIS Conference on Sustainable Schools. It was an incredible experience to interact with excited and motivated individuals from dozens of schools from the US, Canada and Europe. In defiance of many of the attendees’ expectations, science teachers were not the only participants at this conference: there were school board members, several heads-of-school, finance directors, building managers, fundraising coordinators and, of course, many teachers.
It is clear (to me at least) that sustainability has moved well beyond the attention of a few select individuals and is now a major topic of interest for schools that are looking to:
- educate the best and brightest for tomorrow, and
- take a leadership position on this critical world issue.
Presentations from Yale’s sustainability coordinator (did you know Yale had a farm?), Jon Isham from Middlebury College and several of the NAIS sustainability committee members (and impressive crew in their own right) inspired us to create plans of action to take back to our respective schools to keep the momentum going. My intention is to catalog some of the ideas in another blog post in the not-too-distant-future. Meanwhile, check out the Sierra club’s top 20 greenest universities. (More about the Environment)
—Chris Olive, Green Team Faculty Liaison