This Friday, Skyview Junior High will celebrate becoming only the seventh school in the country to win a Green Flag, the highest honor awarded by the National Wildlife Federation’s (NWF) Eco-Schools USA program, for a commitment to sustainability and environmental education. It is the first school honored west of the Mississippi River.
Skyview was recently awarded a WA State Pillar 3 award and nominated for the Department of Education’s U.S. Green Ribbon Schools award for its environmental education and sustainability programs.
The school’s signature achievement is its Outdoor Environmental Learning Center, a student-tended, 6.5-acre outdoor classroom and service learning project in which volunteers have devoted more than 9,800 hours of service to create sustainable trails, dig wetlands, remove invasive plants and plant more than 2,000 native plants as part of a natural habitat. Students also perform field studies and conduct green surveys in the center as part of their science curriculum, a strategy that is partly credited for Skyview’s MSP scores in science rising by more than 10 percent last year. Building on this, Skyview launched a Naturalist in Training Program this year to create environmental leaders to mentor other students on nature studies.
Among other achievements, Skyview also lowered its solid-waste footprint (non-recycled) by 80 percent and boosted its recycling rate and composting rate to more than 95 percent after implementing its waste-reduction program. Nearly 80 percent of seventh- through ninth-graders get to school by carpooling, biking, walking or bussing for 18 percent energy usage reduction since 2008.
NWF’s Eco-Schools USA program recognizes schools for exceptional achievement in “greening” the facilities, grounds, conserving natural resources and integrating environmental education into the curricula and student experience. More than 1,200 schools have implemented the Eco-Schools USA program since NWF became the host of the international program in late 2008 (Washington alone boasts 36 Eco-Schools).
