Environmental Education
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What’s new with environmental education programming at KAB? When Pay Ray, Education Specialist with Keep Akron Beautiful (KAB) for over 21 years retired from the Akron Public Schools (APS), Board of Education, our contract for services was over. It sent the President & CEO, Paula Davis, back to the drawing board or in this case the agency’s clients-Akron’s teachers, K-12. Paula spent the summer or 2009 attending all of the APS Science Curriculum Specialist, Katrina Halasa’s summer enrichment workshops at Ott Staff Development Center. The goal was to re-assess the programming the nonprofit agency had been offering for over two decades and letting the teachers decide what they needed our agency to continue or how we could help them reach their classroom objectives in new ways. The President & CEO brought the ideas back to the KAB Board of Directors and for the 2009-2010 school year and beyond we are partnering with the Akron Public Schools, and other appropriate partners, on the following projects:
Arbor Day Celebration
Classroom presentations for all fourth grade classrooms in the city, Slogan Contest for 3 trees planted on school campuses and seedling distribution for each student.
Be E3 Smart Energy Efficiency Curriculum
Offering teacher training workshop by the Ohio Energy Project on their experiential unit of 7 lessons to be taught by Akron Public Schools 6th grade science teachers for the second spring semester in 2010. Culminating with the distribution of 1,700 Household Energy Efficiency kits to be sent home to families of sixth graders to install, saving them money and the community greenhouse gas emissions. Made possible in 2010 by the ARRA, EECBG grant through the City of Akron and Keep Akron Beautiful.
AEGIS Activating and Energizing Girls Involvement in Science Grant Written
Two grants were written by the Ohio Energy Project and Keep Akron Beautiful to send two groups of APS 8th and 9th grade science teachers and female students to Columbus for a 2010 summer workshop to assemble two energy bikes and bring them back to their cluster to do peer to peer training on energy efficiency in secondary schools. It would also have replaced two electronic boards for two existing energy bikes already in the system.
Akron Public Schools Science Fair-February 2010
Keep Akron Beautiful sent four judges to the middle and secondary school science fair at North High School and selected three monetary winners for the projects that most closely addressed Greenprint for Akron goals.
Green Council
Science Curriculum Specialist, Katrina Halasa, Shelly Kadilak, SASWMA and Paula Davis invited a representative from each of the 58 public schools to meet monthly to start a grassroots movement to promote a system-wide recycling program, beginning with mixed paper. To date we have handed out 58 Keep America Beautiful Setting Up Solid waste recycling Programs in Schools Guidebooks, we have ordered yard signs directed at driving community members to use the paper recycling bins located at 17 of the school buildings and a segment of the buildings have signed up to participate in the Solid Waste Authority’s free recycling separation and disposal program for 2010-2011 school year. SASWMA is doing three Waste Audits in the spring to demonstrate how much of a school’s waste stream should and could be recycled! The council is planning a system-wide event to coincide with America Recycles Day, November 15th. The majority of council members voted for a Zerowaste Day. For the fall, we would like to see a Green Career Day for youth which could be combined with a leadership forum to create a Junior Green Council, made up of environmentally active secondary students.
Summer Science Teacher Enrichment Field Trip
Keep Akron Beautiful wrote a grant to the Smith Foundation which was funded to rent a full-size bus and provide box lunches to take 47 teachers on a Greenprint for Akron Tour of local sites related to one of the 8 Smart areas addressed the city’s sustainability plan. This summer’s 2010 topic has not been determined
40th Earth Day, April 22, 2010
Keep Akron Beautiful partnering with WAPS FM, 91.3 The Point, has scheduled day-long on-air interviews with folks working on various aspects of the Greenprint for Akron goals, in an effort to educate and inform the general public about how they can get involved.
Keep Akron Beautiful Board of Directors Green Task Force
This volunteer task force is deciding on which summer community festivals and organizations they should partner with in 2010 to make them litter-free events and “green” education opportunities to model recycling and showcase energy efficiency.
