If kids today are half as addicted to their iPhones and Xboxes as your grandpa claims, energy conservation should be an uphill struggle. But students at St. Clements Catholic Elementary School have been taking part in enough green-friendly initiatives to make Al Gore look a little sluggish.
For the second year, St. Clements is participating in the Classroom Energy Diet Challenge (CEDC), a joint partnership between Canadian Geographic and Shell. The program offers energy-focused, curriculum-based lesson plans for classes from kindergarten to grade 12. Students participate in a variety of activities to measure and reduce the amount of electric energy they consume in the classroom each day. Though only in its second year, the CEDC has signed some 40,000 students across Canada – more than double last year.
Suzanne Stratford, a Grade 6 teacher at St. Clements, said her students required little motivation to turn the lights off.
“I feel like sometimes the kids are the ones who are more interested in the change,” said Stratford. “I think they’ve grown up with these environmental initiatives. Like recycling – it only came in around the region when I was in high school, but they’ve known it all their lives, so this is second nature to them.”
For Stratford, the CEDC has become a practical teaching tool. “I incorporated that into our curriculum, because we’re currently doing an electricity unit and we’re thinking of conservation – like, how electricity is used, but how we can conserve the energy that we use.”
The CEDC is not the only way students at St. Clements are paying attention to environmental matters. In October, St. Clements became a certified Eco School with Ontario EcoSchools’ official gold rating. The school Eco Club is promoting litter-less lunches and reusable drink containers, as well as expanding the compost program.
“We did a whole school garbage audit, and they were willing to get their hands dirty,” said Stratford of the Eco Club. “They all had their gloves on, they were separating compost from other garbage and recycling, and it got pretty dirty and messy.”
But hey – why should kids that age be worrying themselves with grown-up problems like “global warming” and “energy conservation” anyway?
“It all comes down to sustainability,” said Stratford. “If we continue in the direction we’re going, and using and depleting our resources, there are going to be none left to us. So we have to consider alternate forms of energy, we have to understand how that energy works, and be making it more efficient – things like wind power, solar power.”
She continued, “And kids today, they know these things. They see people with solar panels; we have wind turbines out here in St. Clements. It’s important for us to make the change so that we have resources in the future – and we have to start when they’re young so that it’s a practice they’ll continue as they get older.”
