Going green means much more to Tahoma School District officials than recycling more.

It means integrating the concept of sustainability into its curriculum and not just science classrooms but in history, math, and beyond.

Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning Nancy Skerritt explained the district has had a belief in the value of students learning through the outdoors and the environment because it allows them to become self-directed learners, collaborative workers, effective communicators, community contributors, quality producers and complex thinkers — in other words, meet the district’s desired goals for its students.

“We believe that the environment is a really strong vehicle for kids doing activities to develop those particular outcomes and indicators,” Skerritt said. “The environment provides a wonderful vehicle for service learning and making community contributions. The third piece here is that we have a belief that our young people will have to make some critical decisions about our environment for themselves and their families.”

With the knowledge they would need to teach Tahoma students to be good stewards of existing resources and the idea that they could build on existing outdoor education in the district, Skerritt said, those factors all converged two years ago that led to the development of a sustainability curriculum.

“We’d had pockets in the curriculum,” she said. “What we decided to do was look systemically about how we could build a scope and sequence to give our students a true and deep understanding of sustainability. Sustainability is also about points of view. They’re learning about economics, they’re learning about points of history.”

Skerritt said rather than start building sustainability lessons into science classes as other districts have done, Tahoma officials wanted to start with social science classes.

“It’s really the action component that I think is really unique about our sustainability curriculum,” she said. “There’s a field experience with each unit. Each of the units have some type of service component.”

Students in third grade are learning about salmon and water quality, Skerritt explained, and those children have the opportunity to see salmon spawning upstream “but they also get to see the human impact on the environment.”

“So, how do we meet both human needs and still protect our animal species,” she said. “How do we balance both needs between humans and nature.”

Fourth graders learn about preserving natural wonders and part of that is making the most of the Shadow Lake Bog through a partnership with the non-profit organization SHADOW which works to preserve the bog.

This is part of a unit called “You Decide!” which focuses on sustaining Washington state’s resources.

In addition they learn about national parks using Internet sites to take virtual tours, then they make post cards with information that wowed them and questions about things that got them thinking.

In seventh grade, pupils learn about water issues around the world.

“What is water like in other parts of the world,” Skerritt said. “There are huge issues worldwide with water and access to water. They get involved in some kind of worldwide initiative not necessarily related to water… where they can understand how they can get involved.”

Students at Tahoma Junior High who are in ninth grade learn about sustainability in the “Sounding Off” unit, which has been incorporated into the Washington state history curriculum which “we completely updated … to have it focused on civic responsibility and civic issues.”

“The kids learn about stakeholders, the economics of (Puget Sound), the history of the Sound and how it related to our Native Americans and how the Sound is suffering now,” Skerritt said. “We look at our own situation and how incredibly lucky we are to live where we live because of our access to water.”

Cary Collins, who is part of an integrated curriculum teaching team at Tahoma Junior High, said the unit lasts between five and six weeks.

“Sustainability is really incorporated into all the lessons as we try to instill in students the idea that we want to leave our planet in at least as good of shape as we found it, and hopefully better but not worse,” Collins said in an e-mail interview. “As part of their state-required Classroom Based Assessment, students are required to take a topic and develop it in such a way that they are making a call to action.”

He suggests his students look for things in their lives they can change that seem small.

“I emphasize to students that it is usually to your benefit to do easy, simple things that pull a lot of people in rather than more difficult things that many people won’t do,” Collins said. “For example, turning off lights, reducing temperature in homes, turning off water when brushing teeth, washing cars on your lawn or at the carwash, shorter showers, recycle, etc. And the big plus: Almost all of these options are very doable and they save money, which is always a bonus.”

Collins said he believes his students like the fact “they can have ownership over this topic and what is involved.”

“Our youth certainly see the environment as an issue important to them in their lives and futures and many are very proactive in terms of making changes in their daily lives already before they get to us,” Collins said. “We also have a Green Team here at school and I think in all the schools in the Tahoma School District, so it is something they have been exposed to and are definitely aware of. One of the options that is becoming more and more popular is junior high students teaching in the elementary schools. I just had a group of students do that at Rock Creek and they had it all set up before I even knew that they were going to be doing that. They told me personally that they loved the project and the unit.”

From his perspective, Collins sees this as an opportunity raise awareness of issues to a new level.

“It is amazing to see all the different projects that students develop in their areas of interest,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised to see a greater number of students devising Green Team or environmental projects for their Senior Projects at the high school. Students easily recognize the real-world application and relevance of this subject and many are motivated to find a way to devise and contribute to solutions.”

At the high school, 11th graders will have a four-week long unit called “Lasting Footprints,” which Skerritt said is still a work in progress.

Seniors at Tahoma will get a unit called “Humans and the Environment” where students will become part of a project team.

“These guys will be teaching the fourth graders about issues,” Skerritt said. “That’s the action for the kids, they’ll be giving back to the students in our district.”

Skerritt said that while developing this curriculum has been a major undertaking on the part of the teachers who helped with it, the process has been rewarding for educators and their students, because it allows them to teach and learn outside the traditional research in a library and regurgitate information model.

“We want our kids to be really good writers and thinkers,” she said. “Our belief is that you can use really good content to teach that. Our commitment in this district is to graduate kids who have the skills and who can be active participants in a democratic society.”