By Catherine Colbert

When David Kilbourne picked up his 8-year-old son from Lake Travis Elementary in spring 2007, he noticed smoke billowing from idling buses parked in queue behind the school. The exhaust fumes his son was breathing each day as he waited to be picked up, he says, were contributing to his son’s migraine headaches. “My son is the quarterback for his youth football team,” said Kilbourne. “Because there’s only one quarterback, when he gets these headaches, it affects the team.”

Kilbourne remembers noticing the bus exhaust during the school’s bus safety week. “They were talking about how buses are safe when it comes to traffic accidents,” he said, “but there’s more to a bus’s safety than traffic accidents, like having air that’s safe to breathe.”

The coincidence spurred Kilbourne to take action. Not only did he write several letters to his local newspaper, but Kilbourne approached the head of his district’s transportation department to discuss air quality in and around its buses. After he spoke to Rick Walterscheid, the transportation director at the Lake Travis Independent School District, the school system put a no-idling policy into effect.

Walterscheid didn’t stop there, either. Later that year the 79th Texas Legislature adopted House Bill 3469, which established and authorized the formation of the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) to administer a statewide clean school bus program.

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By Kelly Rondeau
It’s back to the books for kids across America and going green in the classroom has never been so easy. With the help of a popular program called the Go Green Initiative, teachers have quick and simple access online to all the tools and resources needed to green a classroom, an entire [...]

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By Barbara Kessler

College-bound high schoolers looking for an environmentally conscientious college should have no shortage of guidance this year. The Sierra Club has joined the Princeton Review in assessing the green creds of U.S. universities.

Actually, the venerable environmental group was first out with the idea, launching a “Cool Schools” rundown in 2007. Their second annual review, in the group’s Sept./Oct.Sierra magazine, settles on list of the top ten campuses — Ten That Get It — that includes colleges of all sizes from the East to the West.

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By Harriet Blake

Other than the intoxicating smell of new text books and notebooks, the familiar scents of back-to-school may be changing. Ammonia-scented hallways, newly sealed and fuming gym floors, odorously painted classrooms as well as lawns with the subtle scents of pesticide treatments, may be a thing of the past.

In today’s more environmentally conscious world, public and private schools are rethinking how they maintain their buildings. Reducing toxic chemicals in schools – as in our homes — is not only good for the environment, but for those who use these buildings.

In Maryland’s Montgomery County outside of Washington D.C., the public schools have long taken a pro-active approach in using non-toxic cleaners.

“We want our buildings to be clean and at the same time healthy for our students, faculty and the person doing the cleaning,” says Larry Hurd, building services trainer for the school district.

Ten years ago, the district, which oversees 200 schools, changed from an oil-based sealer for their wood gym floors to a water-based sealer. It works well, says Mr. Hurd, and toxins are no longer an issue. “The oil-based sealer was bad for the students and other visitors to our schools, but it was real, real bad for the person applying the sealer.” That person was exposed to the sealer fumes for as much as four hours.

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By Julie Bonnin

Houston’s air quality and recycling rates may be nothing to brag about, but the city’s school district is among the country’s leaders in its commitment to building energy-efficient schools.

Walnut Bend Elementary, on the city’s southwest side, is one of the first of dozens of Houston Independent School District schools that will be built or retrofitted to meet LEED standards, the nationally accepted benchmark for design, operation and construction of high performance “green” buildings.

“We’re the largest employer in Houston, and we feel we have a responsibility to the environment,” says HISD Superintendent Abelardo Saavedra. “We are teaching children, and that means we need to set an example of environmental stewardship that the children can follow.”

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By Shermakaye Bass

Summer’s ending and school’s recommencing — and along with the sound of bells ringing comes the simultaneous groan of kids nationwide. But this year, more American students than ever will return from vacation to a new backdrop, a green schoolhouse.

Yep, the little red school-house of yesteryear is getting a redo, making way for a 21st-century incarnation. Of this country’s 100,000 private and public schools, approximately one a day are now registering for LEED certification, according to the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC).

These little green schoolhouses still teach the “Three R’s” (reading, ‘riting and ‘rithmetic), but they’ve added three more – “Reduce, Recycle, Reuse.” And they’re doing it not just through energy-efficient building principles or water-conserving whiz-bangs, but through curricula, community-outreach projects, cafeterias, landscaping, new buses and transportation policies. One school in Oregon, Clackamas High School, has a city-wide cellphone battery recycling program and last year planted its own orchard.

The greening of America’s schools is a phenomenon to behold. Less than four years ago, Arizona and Washington state were two of the first to require all new public building construction meet LEED Silver requirements. Now dozens of states have green ground rules for schools. New York prohibits the use of non-green cleaners, while its neighbor New Jersey has mandated that all new schools be built to LEED specs. The 58 member schools of the Kentucky Green and Healthy Schools Program marked the project’s first anniversary this year (Kentucky made national news when it banned the sale of non-cafeteria foods on campus a couple of years ago).

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By John DeFore

Joining the existing array of programs addressing school bus pollution this fall (the EPA’s Clean School Bus USA, for example) is a new effort bringing the Texas Parent Teacher Association together with the state’s Commission on Environmental Quality.

The project, announced earlier this month, will supply funds to the PTA for bus pollution-control improvements. In a nice “let the punishment fit the crime” twist, those funds are coming from fines assessed to polluters, and will generally be used near the site of the pollution that provoked the fine.

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By Nima Kapadia
As college students make their way to campuses across the nation for the fall semester, many are thinking ahead to future careers in business, teaching, technology or sustainability. Sustainability?
Yes, says Arizona State University graduate student Brigitte Bavousett Hill, who hopes to use her Master’s Degree in Sustainability to help other countries lower their [...]

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By Barbara Kessler

A coalition of Jewish groups signed a statement last week urging an 80 percent reduction in greenhouse gases by 2050, in keeping with what scientists say is needed to avert a climate disaster. The Jewish Community Priorities for Climate and Energy Policy is supported by a diverse alliance of Jewish groups spearheaded by the Jewish Council for Public Affairs (JCPA) and the Jewish Coalition on the Environment and Jewish Life (COEJL).

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By Nima Kapadia
From degree options to the availability of financial aid and extracurricular activities, college applicants consider a variety of factors when choosing a school.
A college’s sustainability practices are becoming another key factor, and The Princeton Review is trying to help students and parents by including a new category of “green ratings” in its [...]

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By Barbara Kessler

With gas prices pressuring wallets everywhere and climate change warming the planet, people are looking to the sun for some salvation. It’s paradoxical yes, but so sensible. The sun’s energy burns brightly on Earth and is capable of powering our homes and potentially our cars, if that power can be efficiently harvested.

For the current transportation crisis, it would be a dream solution: An ever-present source of energy powering vehicles with zero emissions. In 2008, however, science has yet to figure out how to make solar cars move as quickly as we’d like them to; carry heavy loads and not peter out when the sun goes down.

Fortunately for us hopeful drivers, the top engineers in the world are now focusing on these issues — as are many motivated college students and even a handful of high school kids.

We caught up with some of those aspiring younger solar engineers recently at the Dell-Winston School Solar Car Challenge in Fort Worth, Texas, where they competed to see who could field a car that could successfully run 400 laps on the 1.5 mile track at Texas Motor Speedway.

The competition has been engaging students from all over the country in solar technology for 15 years, producing cars that amaze their creators with how well and how far they can ride on the sun’s energy. In even years, the teams run cars on the NASCAR track and in the odd-years, they run a cross country race. This year’s race saw them running faster cars, with better solar arrays and specially crafted frames from the latest available metals. The race left the students and the teachers buzzing about the possibilities. Watch the video report.

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By Kelly Rondeau

You’ve heard of No Child Left Behind. Now comes a new program with serious educational goals, but a different approach: No Child Left Inside proposes to re-invigorate environmental education by tapping into kids’ innate curiosity about nature. And communities across America are embracing the fresh, bottom-up concept by holding No Child Left Inside events.

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