Thirty-one members and six teachers from Riverside-Brookfield High School of Environmental Education (SEE) gave up their first week of summer vacation to travel to New Orleans and spent the better part of a week working in hot, humid and often rainy weather to help out in the effort to restore costal wetlands that were so badly damaged by Hurricane Katrina.
The students worked to restore a city park, worked to restore native shore grasses along the banks of Lake Pontchartrain, and planted oyster grass in an estuary between the Mississippi and Atchafalaya rivers.
But that’s not the only thing RB students have been doing to improve the environment.
Closer to home, RB students gather once a month on Sunday at Waubansee Woods and spend hours pulling out non-native plants in an attempt to restore the woods to a more native state. The students are members of RB’s Ecology Club, which has approximately 75 members and is one of the strongest clubs at the school, according to Superintendent/Principal Jack Baldermann.
Environmental concerns have become so important at RB that this spring the school board formally made addressing environmental concerns a goal of the school district.
The goal reads that “RBHS will affirm and actively promote the public’s right to a healthy quality environment and will be committed to environmental excellence now and in the future through:
a commitment to environmental education for the entire school community,
promoting the concept of environmental stewardship,
environmental responsible purchasing policies,
maximum energy efficiency and conservation,
sustainable design principles in land use, transportation, landscape and building planning.”
“Our students, parents, teachers, citizens and board are very interested in this goal,” said Baldermann. “It has support from all levels. It’s something we’re committed to. It’s something our teachers are committed to. It’s something our students are very committed to.”
RB has taken a number of steps to be more environmentally conscious in its day-to-day activities. For example, the school is part of an environment-friendly cleaning project purchasing plan through Aramark, the company hired to clean and maintain the school, and is in the process of phasing out all of its old cleaning products and replacing them with green products. RB also has a school-wide recycling program, which it plans on intensifying.
The high school’s maintenance workers have taken to driving electric golf carts instead of a gas guzzling Ford pick truck to transport materials around the school grounds whenever possible.
RB is the only high school that is part of the Chicago Wilderness Consortium, a group that seeks to maintain wilderness in the Chicago metropolitan area. Last spring, RB held a “bike to school” day where students were encouraged to bike or walk to school.
In addition, the high school district is incorporating some green, environmentally friendly designs into its nearly $64 million addition and renovation. The school will have a light-colored roof, which will help reflect heat, more efficient light fixtures, low emission carpets and recycled rubber in the flooring in the new field house, according to Pat Sumrow, who is working with RB on the project.
However, the school board decided not to seek LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification because of the expense involved. LEED certification is based on a rating system that awards points for a variety of environmentally sensitive features in a building.
But the District 208 school board decided that while it wished to incorporate as many green features into the building as possible, it just wasn’t economically feasible to attempt to gain LEED certification with a building as old as RB.
“The board’s directive is to make it as green as possible as long as we’re being fiscally responsible,” said Baldermann. “They’re very serious about the green goal, but we have fiscal concerns.”
