School Theme Project Description

Britannia Sustainability Education Meatless Monday Campaign

Churchill & Ideal Mini Active Transportation Bike to School Week Event

Foundation (Killarney) Resource Conservation – Waste & Water

Access to water and reusable water containers

Gladstone Green Spaces School garden & greenhouse improvements

John Oliver Resource Conservation – Waste

J&O Upcycling – community clothing swap

King George Resource Conservation – Waste

Reusable to-go cups

Magee Resource Conservation – Waste

Soft plastic recycling programming

Prince of Wales Green Spaces Re-establish school garden

Prince of Wales Sustainability Education Sustainability Week event

Templeton Active Transportation Increase bike parking

David Thompson Sustainability Education Grow Your Own Green Team

Total Education (Eric Hamber) Resource Conservation – Waste

Improved recycling program

Tupper Resource Conservation – Waste

Improved waste and recycling awareness

University Hill Green Spaces Roof-top garden improvements

University Hill Sustainability Education Environmental Awareness Week

University Transition Program Green Spaces Wildlife habitat enhancement

Vancouver Learning Network Sustainability Education Sustainability awareness & seed giveaway at Car-Free Day

Windermere Green Spaces Aquaponics System

2018-2019 Secondary Sustainability Grants

Launched in the fall of 2018, Secondary School Sustainability Grants of up to $1000 were available to every VSB secondary

school. Covering everything from fashion upcycling to reusable cups, plastic recycling to active transportation, VSB students are

tackling the environmental sustainability challenges facing the world today. Students worked collaboratively with their peers,

teachers, and school support staff to improve sustainability for their school and for the wider community.

The sustainability projects identified by students give us great insight into the most pressing issues facing schools and students,

and also help to see what kinds of solutions might work across the district. The majority of projects addressed the issue of recy-

cling awareness, and students put on awareness campaigns for their peers, piloted new recycling diversion programs, and en-

couraged their fellow students to consume less and reuse more!

Please keep reading t o learn more about the projects undertaken this year.

2018-2019 Secondary Sustainability Grant Reports

Prince of Wales Garden

We asked Earth Bites to teach us about the garden, its maintenance and how to have a more productive season. We started

out planning the garden with the feet method, breaking the beds into blocks and planting different plants within these blocks.

We learned about perennial plants, how to plant properly, when the beds need filling up and even a new perspective on how

to water the beds. Many of our meeting were also spent on moving and mixing the new fertile dirt that Earth Bites provided us

with. Earth Bites helped teach us how to repair each piece of equipment, what new equipment to buy and how to organize our

tool shed. Each Wednesday we would have 2 hours meetings with students from the school to plan, plant and work in the gar-

den. We are planning a large harvest feast at the end of the year to encourage more participants. We also hope to have a har-

vest of honey with the bees that we host from East Van Bees, rejuvenate our apple trees and learn more about how to main-

tain them properly and help them grow. Not only is the garden looking very productive, but we’ve also learned a lot during the

process.

Prince of Wales Sustainability Club

We hosted a sustainability awareness week, full of activities to increase student awareness of sustainability practices and to

promote simple things student can do to start their journey of becoming a responsible citizen.

Tuesday - Friday: Class vs class recycling competition - In 1-3 classes, students are encouraged to bring their old/unusable pens/markers, electronics, plastic bags, and fabric. Students will be able to fill their classroom boxes all week, and the class that collects the most recycling will win a class pizza party!

Tuesday: Zero-waste lunch day - Pack your own waste free lunch or bring your container to the cafeteria, show us in the cafe-teria at lunch to win a prize and a chance to win a $25 Patagonia gift card!

Wednesday: Influential people in sustainability panel - Join us at lunch in the library to hear first-hand experiences and stories from professionals who are making our city greener.

Thursday: Make your own t-shirt bag day - Bring an old t-shirt and join us at lunch in the cafeteria to learn how to make your own upcycled t-shirt bag!

Total Education Green Gurus

The Green Gurus have made some headway in terms of managing the large and diverse amount of waste coming into our school, but certainly we’ve got a lot more work to do. We set up a “Responsible Disposal Site” after seeing the packaging from our lunch program wasn’t being recycled properly, everything from full milk and mayonnaise containers to soiled cardboard containers from pasta salad, etc., being put into the blue bins. Green Chair Recycling visited our school in March and provided us with a dynamic, interactive and fun presentation about best recycling practices which not only worked to make people aware of where to put what, but also inspired us to take all of our plastic milk con-tainers and use them as pots for propagating seeds.

Our garden is still in the fledgling stages of being developed, sod being turned, lumber being purchased. Our feeling is that once our garden boxes are in place we will contact Cedar Creek Enterprises to establish our three bin system, slated for September 2019. Next year we’re excited about educating our population about com-posting and further emphasizing the necessity of responsible dis-posal of garbage. It’s a big job, but somebody has to do it! We're committed to showing the way such that all Total Education students can be sustainability stewards.

University Transition Program Sustainability Club

Since February, the Sustainability Club at the University Transition Pro-gram has been busy buying, building, and setting up bee hives. The Sus-tainability Grant for our program ($500) allowed us to purchase from Home Depot, six commercial bee houses, planting soil, planters and seeds and bulbs. After doing some background research, and discussing how to proceed by contacting the head curator Entomologist for the UBC Beaty Museum, we learned that the bee homes that were purchased needed to be modified in order to avoid pests such as wasps and other parasites.

20 students gathered and began to modify the bee homes to cater solely to the bees. In addition to changing the bee hives, we also germinated plants in our school garden to attract the bees to the hotels. Subsequent-ly, we went on a search for the perfect place to put one of these homes around UBC and found an ideal tree along Marine Drive where the bee house would face south and was surrounded by flowering plants. This sustainability grant allowed us to partner with other organizations and could allow for current sustainable actions to continue for years to come. As a community, we will continue to visit and asses the effectiveness of our Bee houses at UBC in subsequent years. Our sustainability group hopes that the sustainability grant will help Vancouver take small steps towards saving our environment.

University Hill Secondary Environmental Awareness Week

The organization Protect Our Winters sent three elite ski ambassadors to deliver a presentation about climate change. Students presented a video capturing UHill’s current waste practices, and ways we can reduce our personal waste output. During Awareness Week student leaders and volunteers ran four separate stations raising awareness through different modes. Participating students signed up to be eligible for eco-healthy prizes. Staff and students signed up for a personal pledge for 1 week that was publicly posted and we drew prizes and had conversations with students about their pledges. Slightly over 100 people pledged. Rolled out writing utensil recycling bins throughout the school. Plans for the future: set up a Super Station to educate students in real-time over lunch hour of how to dispose of their waste

University Hill is fortunate in that it

has a rooftop area for gardening.

Over the past several years, the

rooftop planters have been home to

spring bulbs and summer vegetables.

While the bulbs have grown well, the

shorter flowers cannot always be

seen from inside the school, and the

vegetables have at times not fared

well in the garden due to its VERY hot

growing conditions and strong winds.

This year the Garden Club decided to

explore how well the succulent varie-

ty of plants would grow under these

conditions and looked to creating a

year-round garden that could be

viewed from the inside of the school

as well as from the roof.

University Hill Secondary Succulent

Templeton Environment Club

We determined that Templeton had a need to increase the number of availa-ble spaces for bike parking, as we are a large commuter school with students biking to school all year round. We found it was a bit of a process to get new bike racks but worked out very well in the end and were able to more than double our current capacity.

We worked with the maintenance department to rearrange our existing racks and create a new bike rack area by out flag pole. The bike racks were immediately used, however, they were also a mismatch of colors … blue and grey and rusty as well. So we worked with the VSB paint department to get the racks painted. They look great and now that the weather is good, they are filled every day.

Next year we will have a big event for Bike To Work Week.

King George Earth Club

With the City of Vancouver looking to ban the use of single use cups and straws by 2019 our students want to lead this charge by changing student habits. The main focus of their project is to order and issue stu-dent designed re-useable cups for every student and staff in the school. Through education and public service type announcements in school, our environmental leaders hope to empower personal responsibility. The student body will be educated to see the importance of taking the time to clean their mugs and use them to their favorite spot and to con-sider bringing their own clean containers for takeout.

We also worked with a local artist, K.A Colorado, to create an art piece highlighting the issue of climate change and giving students of many classes in the school a unique opportunity to think critically about the issue and have their words place on the artwork which now resides in our school.

Britannia Green Club

We initiated a Meatless Monday program at school to raise

awareness about the importance of going meatless and the dire

impacts meat production has on our environment such as how

much water is used and how much greenhouse gases are pro-

duced. Consuming less meat and meat products is a healthy

choice and a humane one as well to support animal wellbeing.

Going meatless to a more sustainable plant-based diet at

least one day each week is a powerful way for each of us to

reduce our carbon footprint. Our green club has set up booths,

handed out vegan food samples, and created media to promote

the importance of going meatless and how it can benefit every-

one on a local and global scale!

Windermere Garden Club

This year, the garden club worked with UBC Land and Food system stu-

dents to help rebuild our school’s aquaponics system that combines the

use of hydroponics and fish. The project was a great success as the aqua-

ponics system is running well and is a great educational piece to talk about

closed-looped systems, sustainability, and the nitrogen cycle. In addition,

science classes were involved in creating educational resources for teach-

ers so that more classes would be able to use the aquaponics system as a

learning tool.

In addition to our aquaponics system, the garden club also worked with the

cafeteria class to plan a community long table dinner to celebrate our gar-

den space and the power of food in creating community. The dinner will

feature a 3 course vegetarian meal featuring produce from our garden and

a local supplier. The dinner is planned for June 7th, and we have close to 50

people who will be attending including staff, students, parent advisory

committee, and community members.

David Thompson Green Team

The David Thompson Green Team was able to host our annual Grow

Your Own Green Team Conference on for 62 elementary school children

from Fleming, Waverley, and Tecumseh elementary schools. The event

featured fun activities for kids from grades 1-6. The group was split up

into two. The first group was given a presentation on how to upcycle old

objects and make other uses out of them. The children participants used

old CD’s and bottle caps to make colourful spin top toys. The second

group were given a tour of the garden and viewed different types of

plants while also learning about composting. The children experienced

the operation of our industrial size composter and saw our process of

making compost on school grounds.

This year we also invited three guest speakers from environmentally

focused non-profits and small businesses to host workshops with our

Green Team youth leaders during the lunch hour: Fresh Roots, The Soap

Dispensary, and The Wilderness Committee.

Vancouver Learning Network

The efforts of the student voice group at VLN came to fruition on Sunday, at Car-Free Day Main Street, where they had a

stall, and handed out packages of seeds free in return for sustainability pledges. The seeds are native BC wild flowers and

food plants.

Do you have your own story of sustainability success? Share your

stories, ideas, or concerns with us at sustainability@vsb.bc.ca

More sustainability grant reports to come…