One school in Middletown, Md., built out of a barn in Frederick County, is passing on lessons about environmental stewardship to its students, leading by example, if you will, the Frederick News-Post reports.
Victoria L Brown runs the Lucy School with her husband. It’s a school with a mission that clearly embodies the goals of sustainability:
To provide a child-centered and individualized arts enriched program (including drama, creative movement, dance, puppetry, music and visual arts) that will stimulate, nurture, and enhance the intellectual, emotional, physical, social, aesthetic, and creative development of young children, ages three through fifth grade. By example, we will nurture a love and respect for community, family, nature, and the environment. We seek to do this within a small and familiar environment on a 17-acre farm setting that integrates the elements and aesthetics of nature into the learning process. We value the involvement of parents and grandparents and offer parent-child workshops that explore integrating creative arts in their child rearing.
One of those parent-child events occurred today. Families were invited to come to the school for storytime, outdoor play, and a nature scavenger hunt.
Many lessons at the school have an environmental theme behind them. For example, the youngest children one day noticed they were throwing lots of plastic from their lunches in the garbage. They decided to write a letter to parents to encourage more environmentally friendly lunch packing habits.
Through the use of solar panels on the roof, tree oil as a disinfectant instead of bleach, urinals that don’t use water, big windows, and light pipes that bring the sun’s natural light to many areas of the building and reduce the need for electrical lighting, the building has been certified at the highest level, known as platinum, by the US Green Building Council.
The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED, certification process involves a point system where buildings earn so many points for each project they undertake aimed at environmental sustainability. “To receive LEED certification, building projects satisfy prerequisites and earn points to achieve different levels of certification. Prerequisites and credits differ for each rating system, and teams choose the best fit for their project,” writes the council on its website.
The school serves 3-year-olds through fifth graders, and by the time students get to fifth grade, many have become strong advocates for the environment.
The school’s assistant director, a former Frederick County Public Schools teacher, has two children, both of whom attended the Lucy School.
She told the News-Post that a few environmental habits have stuck, even though her children are now teenagers. They’re conscious of where their food comes from, and they worry about potentially harmful chemicals in cleaning products, the paper quoted her as saying about her own children.
