The Community School
Rural Sustainable Schools Project
Summary
The Community School is breaking new ground in the realm of educational innovation. We have been working to develop an early stage prototype of a new model for rural education transformation: the Sustainable School. We are in the process of evolving our educational design; benchmarking other models in various regions of the country; and testing the viability of the business design with conservationists, philanthropists, educators, and community and economic development organizations.
A Sustainable School does more than just educate students. It also preserves and restores the community’s ecosystems; helps build the social fabric of the community and maintain its cultural heritage; and contributes to local economic development.
A Sustainable School—whether public or private—has the following design characteristics:
· The curriculum is organized around the core themes of sustainability, stewardship, and social justice and based on local, regional, and/or national curricular frameworks.
· The learning design emphasizes experiential and service learning allowing students to work on authentic sustainable development projects in their communities. Students perform real work and contribute original research to natural resource management strategies and social justice target areas.
· The school is linked to a set of working economic assets that seek to model sustainability principles in their operations. These assets create opportunities for experiential learning; generate income for the school; and create economic development opportunities for the community.
In the most fully developed model of a Sustainable School, a significant portion of the school’s budget would be derived from the earnings of its working assets. The Sustainable School is directly engaged in the building of skills for environmental and community stewardship. This is done first and foremost through ownership by the school of natural resource assets, as well collaborative relationships with natural resource owners and managers, social justice groups, and other local agencies.
We believe the model developed through this process could be useful to many different rural regions of the country that are facing a similar set of challenges: disintegration of their economic base; depletion of their ecological and cultural resources and assets; erosion of social capital due to out-migration when the populace moves to suburban or urban areas; and deterioration of their education systems due to low tax bases, difficulty attracting and keeping high quality teachers, and declining enrollments.
The single most significant moral, social, and economic challenge we face as a society is determining how to design communities and economies which can provide a high quality of life without critically damaging the natural ecologies upon which our welfare ultimately depends. Adapting to these challenges will require a level of innovation, ingenuity and flexibility beyond anything we have experienced to date. The world our students will live in will be fundamentally changed as a result. It is time for educational institutions to begin to provide leadership and support to our communities as we invent our way into a sustainable future.
We believe it is possible to develop a sustainable, high quality school model for rural areas that is able to increase student achievement and post-secondary success while it also supports the protection, conservation and restoration of natural systems; supports community-building and the creation of social capital; and contributes to sustainable rural economic development.
Powerful student learning derives from: a strong sense of identity, aspiration towards a positivefuture, authentic engagement with adults, and engagement in learning from real problems and real experiences.
A Sustainable School organizes its learning around these pre-requisites of identity, aspiration, engagement, and experiential learning:
· Students are actively encouraged to cultivate their personal identity as a global citizen who is contributing to a sustainable future.
· There is an emphasis on positive solutions to challenges of sustainability rather than seemingly insolvable dilemmas and looming disasters. Sustainability themes are integrated into core curriculum areas.
· Students are connected with adults who are actively engaged in sustainable development activities.
· Large portions of curriculum are organized around experiential and service learning. Courses focusing on conservation management, sustainable farming, affordable housing, education, health, local culture and traditional arts, forestry, environmental monitoring and mapping; justice, etc. all support key curricular elements.
The 2007-09 pilot phase of the Rural Sustainable Schools Project partners our students with local landowners and conservation groups to manage public and privately-owned forested and open lands, integrating curricular objectives into all aspects of land stewardship. In addition, The Community School staff and students are working with county social justice organizations to identify and address problems in the current structures for communication and funding; these discrepancies hamper the effective delivery of services, magnifying existing inequalities around poverty and education. This initiative has several key components: Stewardship and Sustainability, Community Outreach, and Public Education and Awareness.
Final deliverables for this pilot phase will include:
· A concept document describing the overall design for the Rural Sustainable School
· A benchmarking report from schools across the country which have made sustainable development a core theme
· Recommended operating systems for the following design elements of a Rural Sustainable School: curriculum design for sustainable communities; strategies for teaching and practicing natural and cultural resource stewardship, including ownership and management of working natural landscape assets and connections to community assets; strategies for community engagement, education, and awareness; and strategies for school involvement in local economic development
· Financial plans and business models for such a school (pro-forma budgets, etc.)
· A risk assessment of each element of the Rural Sustainable Schools model—what can go wrong and how to prevent it
· A database of reactions, ideas, and suggestions for improvement from philanthropists, educators, business owners, social justice advocates, and conservationists
· The recommended strategy for exploring the feasibility of such a school—private or public— in a new location in rural America
A copy of the complete Rural Sustainable School concept paper is available for your review.
