Why Should Schools Model Sustainable Practices?

Schools teach sustainable community behavior by their institutional practices.

Students are acutely sensitive to whether the school's stated values are reflected in its actions. For that reason, all of the school's decisions and practices become teaching opportunities. They also become chances to contribute directly to making communities more sustainable and to model sustainable practices for those communities.

Schools are part of larger geographical, political, and economic communities. They depend on those communities for tax revenues and other resources. When schools provision themselves, contribute to public affairs, form partnerships, and set examples they impact the communities around them. Schools use their larger communities as real-world classrooms, laboratories for civic engagement, and opportunities for learning through service.

Schools take in energy and resources, which they transform, recycle, or discharge into the systems that surround them. They make those systems more or less sustainable by the materials they use and the suppliers and other organizations they support. They alter the wider community by the pollution, waste, and greenhouse emissions they generate or eliminate. They impact the environment through the resources and energy needed to transport people to them, the open space they occupy, and the burden they place (or reduce) on community infrastructure, such as water systems.