With his junior year at Durham Academy nearing a close, Chaz Strickland has been doing a lot of thinking about what’s next. There’s college, work, life as a young adult — lots to work toward and look forward to.
“But I think if we continue to ignore sustainability, the future that I’m preparing for won’t come to fruition,” said Strickland, co-chair of the Upper School Student Government Sustainability Committee. “And so as I start thinking more and more about that as my time at DA comes to a close, I think sustainability becomes more and more important in my mind.”
With DA’s bigger-than-ever observation of Earth Day, Strickland and fellow environmentally-minded students and faculty hope that sustainability is top of mind for many others, too. DA’s 2021 Earth Day celebration is spanning the entire week and bringing together Upper Schoolers, Lower Schoolers and Preschoolers to appreciate nature and give the Earth some TLC.
At the same time, a group of industrious Middle Schoolers is looking toward soon breaking ground on a rain garden project that aims to absorb stormwater runoff from the new Arts and World Languages Center parking lot.
‘What We Have to Do’
In recent years, the Upper School has worked to incorporate sustainability into both student life and the curriculum, starting with the inclusion of a Sustainability Committee when Student Government restructured in 2019. Co-chairing this year’s committee with Strickland is sophomore Sanju Patel, who said that being able to bring campus sustainability discussions to the same table as ones about student life and academics “shows that we’re really valued — that the things we talk about are one of the most important things that student government can consider.”
The 2020–2021 school year brought even more of a focus on sustainability in the Upper School, with the addition of a sustainability component to the required ninth-grade Self and Community course. The sustainability-focused class meetings are led by faculty member Tina Bessias ’78, who took on the newly created role of Upper School sustainability coordinator this year.
“Living Sustainably is the name of the course,” she said. “It’s the concept of what we have to do as a school, as individuals, as a community, as a country — we have to make a big change in direction here in terms of how we live our daily lives. We’re using up too many of the Earth’s resources. It’s not sustainable.”
One huge wake-up call for Bessias and many others at DA was the 2018 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, which called for cutting carbon dioxide emissions by 50 percent by 2030. And beyond the importance of the school being a responsible member of the global community, it was becoming obvious that the health of DA’s own students called for taking action.
“In multiple surveys, a majority of Upper School students reported feeling high levels of worry and even hopelessness about the state of the planet they will inherit,” Bessias said. “Earth Day is about celebrating the planet and taking actions that foster hope.”
So the Upper School Sustainability Committee members and all ninth-graders (through the Living Sustainably course) have worked over the past several weeks to create opportunities for students of all ages to get their hands dirty as they celebrate and nurture the Earth. Several ninth-graders got knee-deep in mud to plant a pollinator garden by the track alongside Pickett Road, while others posted Earth Day signs created by their classmates and Lower Schoolers around campus.
Other activities included Upper Schoolers helping lead Lower Schoolers on nature walks and scavenger hunts, and helping kindergartners plant seeds. Several ninth-graders even arrived on campus a half-hour early to collect household compost scraps as parents dropped off students.
“One thing we are trying to focus on this year is to instill value in nature throughout the entire DA system,” Patel said. “We talked about how can we help teachers understand this and incorporate it into their curriculum? How can we help students understand it and even parents when they're dropping their kids off at school? If we have that knowledge through the whole school, that’s a really good way to build sustainability.”
“We think that that education cannot start early enough, because you really form strong opinions of the world when you are in Preschool and when you are in the Lower School — that is a formative period of your life,” Strickland added.
Fourth-grade teaching assistant and ninth-grade parent Kim Hackman was delighted for the Upper Schoolers to work with her students.
“It was so nice to celebrate Earth Day by having some DA ninth-graders come to the Lower School to share their passion for living sustainably,” she said. “DA students spent time together planting seeds, collecting compost and sharing ideas for how we can all help with conserving Earth’s resources. I don’t think we could have asked for better role models than our own ninth-graders.”
In addition to the on-campus activities, ninth-graders created a Living Sustainably website, which they populated with ideas for families to celebrate Earth Day and make changes toward a more sustainable lifestyle. Lydia Amanueal is among a group of ninth-graders who have been focusing on Count Us In, a platform in which one can pledge to take a step toward reducing carbon emissions — like flying less, adjusting a home thermostat or cutting food waste. Amanueal created a video that emphasizes the importance of taking action.
“Especially as a community, l think we all need to contribute to a vision for a better future for the rest of our lives and also the later generations,” she said. “We’re all dependent on the Earth.”
Middle School Rain Garden
At the Middle School, students in Barb Kanoy’s Science In Action (SIA) elective course recently reached a milestone in their rain garden project: approval by DA’s Building and Grounds Committee and funding.
The project began last school year when Kanoy posed a question to her students regarding the then-in-construction Arts and World Languages Center: “What opportunity can you find to make a net positive environmental impact with this construction site?” After talking with several people involved with the construction, it became apparent that their focus should be on stormwater, and the students decided that they could have the biggest impact with a rain garden. Rain gardens serve as water filtration systems that hold water for a short period of time, allowing the water to seep into the ground slowly and into plants, with the excess making its way into a drain.
The SIA class is very much student-driven, and while much planning was done by the 2019–2020 class, the 2020–2021 class had an opportunity to either continue with the project or shift to something new. Much to Kanoy’s relief — and that of eighth-grader Luis Pastor-Valverde, who enrolled in the class as both a seventh- and eighth-grader — this year’s students chose to continue with the rain garden project.
“They really wanted it to be there because it was draining the parking lot and they didn't want to just take stormwater from a rooftop, which is relatively clean — they wanted to actually do something with some more significance,” Kanoy said. “They stuck with it even though people kept saying, ‘it would be easier if …,’ ‘it would be easier if …’ ”
Of the six students enrolled in this year’s SIA class, half focused on soil engineering, while the other half did an engineering analysis of the ground and slope to determine the best location of the garden. Their work has involved hours of conversations with professionals (engineers, stormwater educators, professors, construction workers, city planners, horticulture experts); lots of trial and error; and a whole lot of math.
“For the mapping part, we had a lot of really big numbers and a lot of restrictions that we had to go through to make sure that nothing was too extreme or too big,” Pastor-Valverde said. “And so it was hard because we had to consider a lot of things like how much water can we let in, how big can we actually make this garden, how far can the slope be. And then when we came up with an answer that worked, it just felt really satisfying.”
The SIA students presented their plan to the Building and Grounds Committee — which comprises DA trustees, administrators and other community members — on April 14. There were plenty of details on the science behind the decisions, plant options, the timeline for installation, a plan for maintenance and the budget.
Building and Grounds member Lee Barnes ’86 — who is also a trustee, alumnus, current parent and parent of an alumnus — was blown away by the presentation, so much so that he and his wife, Christy, offered to cover the cost of the project.
“To me, this is what DA is all about and should be about. That’s amazing work by Ms. Kanoy and the students. They should be very proud of not just the product, but the process,” he said. “I see a use here in perpetuity that beautifies the school while serving a practical purpose. The combination of everything that came together on this is remarkable.”
For SIA student Cana Yao, a seventh-grader, it felt “pretty awesome.”
“We put in a lot of work, and we were worried that it wasn’t going to go over well,” she said. “I was really really happy with how it turned out and how generous the people were.”
With the project’s approval, work can now begin to bring the garden to life. Students hope to get to work on hardscaping later this spring or early this summer, with planting to follow and a second major planting in early fall. Volunteers will be welcome.
With two years of SIA under his belt, Pastor-Valverde called it “a really fun class.”
“I hope more fun stuff like this can be done in the future,” he said. “Because actually seeing something that you’ve been working on get implemented — that’s just really, really nice.”