When BAPS Charities held its fourth annual walkathon in Robbinsville May 22, it did so with the goal of making a global impact.
Walk Green 2016 raised thousands of dollars, as well as support for The Nature Conservancy’s efforts to plant one billion trees by 2025. But while the charitable arm of the Robbinsville-based mandir wanted to increase environmentalism around the world, it also has made a difference much closer to home.
The Sharon Elementary School Green Team—a group of environmentally minded first and second graders—benefited from Walk Green 2016 as well, receiving $3,500 from BAPS that will go toward materials needed to renovate an old courtyard at the school. By clearing out the courtyard and nurturing the land, the Green Team will create more space for outdoor classes and meeting areas.
The club hopes the project and BAPS donation spark an environmental movement at the elementary school. It’s an attitude the Green Team has been working hard to foster since the beginning of the 2015-16 school year.
“Hopefully what we’re starting as just a small group of teachers and their classes turns into something big,” Sharon School teacher Pete Klapsogeorge said. “I think just by getting a simple garden going now is something that is going to catch the eye of others, and hopefully this is just the start of something big.”
This past spring kept the Green Team busy. The 1st and 2nd grade students in the club took responsibility for three ground-level gardens, a Crayola-sponsored program called “ColorCycle” and a rooftop garden at the school. The club has help from teachers Klapsogeorge, Jodi Kulin and CJ Nami. Klapsogeorge has been impressed with the young students’ enthusiasm in taking on the “green” lifestyle.
The idea for the Green Team started last spring, but the team first became active this year. Klapsogeorge, Kulin and Nami volunteered to start up the team with their 1st and 2nd grade classes. Kulin, who teaches 2nd grade, began ColorCycling at the school, which requires students collect used markers and send them to Crayola to be recycled.
Klapsogeorge, who teaches 1st grade, has a background in landscape architecture and a passion for protecting the planet.
“We have a big environmental focus just the way that we live our lives,” Klapsogeorge said. “I think that us living that way kind of transcends down to them, so they become interested in saving the world, too.”
Out of the various green projects going on at the school, Klapsogeorge especially enjoys tending to the vegetable and flower gardens with the students.
“It’s been so neat to see our classes becoming so interested in it and taking care of our garden and kind of developing ownership over it,” Klapsogeorge said.
With the end of the school year, Klapsogeorge arranged with Pam Elmi, the director of the Robbinsville Extended Day program, to have her and the students keep up the garden over the summer months.
“After school [in early June], I was walking in, and I saw that the RED program was taking care of the garden.” Klapsogeorge said. “There will be another group of kids that will develop ownership over the garden.”
Three out of four of the available outdoor gardens are full of different vegetables, herbs and flowers. The wooden-structured garden boxes have been used in the past by teachers who are now retired, but have been left untended in the last few years, Klapsogeorge said. Now, anyone passing by the playground area can see that the gardens are full of green leaves and vibrant golden petals.
A number of the plants in the gardens have been donated by other teachers. Looking at the school, the first garden on the left contains five cherry tomato plants, one tomato plant, one spring mix, multiple petunias and marigolds. The garden in the center houses the majority of the vegetables, including tomatoes, parsley, eggplant, peppers and other herbs. And the garden to the right serves as the school’s very own strawberry patch.
The Green Team’s garden isn’t the only green part of the elementary school. The new building addition has a lot of “cool green features,” Klapsogeorge said. The students and the staff have become more aware of the energy use of the school thanks to one of those features: Solrenview, a system that tracks and charts energy use associated with solar panels.
The addition’s entire roof is lined with solar panels, and the energy savings are tracked and are visible on a screen inside the building. Anyone can check up on how much energy was generated by the solar panels on a daily or an overall basis. The building addition is also set to automatically turn the lights on and off, so they’re only in use when someone is using the hallways.
In 2010, the Robbinsville School District started an Energy Conservation Initiative led by teachers who are passionate about making the school system more environmentally friendly and, in turn, more financially responsible. Mike Pate, the current director of the initiative, will send emails to the teachers in the district to remind them the difference that little efforts can make, such as turning off the lights or shutting windows and blinds when not in the room. In the 2015-16 school year, the district saved $232,701 on utilities.
These efforts made by the school community had such an impact in energy consumption that the energy company noticed and was questioning the schools about it, Klapsogeorge said. Between 2010-15, the amount of energy conserved is equal to 98,458 tree seedlings being planted. The district has saved $1.8-million in energy costs since the initiative’s inception in 2010.
Klapsogeorge is hoping that the money from the BAPS donation will create more opportunities for the Green Team, which will allow the team to expand beyond the 1st and second grades and get more students involved, like the RED Program is this summer.
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