Sustainable Schools At Work: Georgia Middle School Kicks Off Year-Long Project

Picture your ideal community. What would it look like? What would stay the same, what might change -- and what ripple effects might those changes have?

All students in Vermont’s Georgia Middle School (GMS), grades 5-8, are digging into these and other big questions surrounding sustainability in a first-ever, year-long project. Educators at Shelburne Farms, together with partners at UP for Learning, launched the program with GMS in September. In the coming school year, students will explore the UN Sustainable Development Goals and what they mean for their town, then develop recommendations and implement action projects to help achieve those goals in their community, addressing global issues on a local scale.

Students hit the ground running on day one. The kickoff began with a large group game, pictured below, a kinesthetic representation of a system. Students observed and unpacked what happens when parts of a system start to change.

“I don’t know why after so many years of working with students that I’m surprised by their ability to deeply understand big concepts like systems, but they really seemed to get it,” says Shelburne Farms educator Courtney Mulcahy, who helped lead the day’s events. “They easily caught on to how they not only are a part of a large ecosystem, but also that their actions – regardless of how small – have an effect on other parts of the system in some way. I’m looking forward to seeing where they go with their work.”

Using drawings and brainstorms of their ideal communities, students then dug into which Sustainable Development Goals were their biggest priorities.

As part of rich and layered programming this year, Shelburne Farms and UP for Learning will lead three experiences for students, and more than half a dozen after-school sessions for classroom teachers as they design program curricula. Community events are in the works, too. “Students are doing the heavy lifting – the projects,” says Shelburne Farms’ Director of Professional Learning Jen Cirillo. The GMS collaboration builds on other Shelburne Farms projects – Cultivating Pathways to Sustainability and the program Local Action, Global Impact: the Sustainable Development Goals in my Neighborhood – scaled school-wide.

“It’s the age where kids come into recognizing the things that are going on in the world and wanting to have an opportunity to create a voice and create change,” GMS principal Julie Conrad told the Saint Albans Messenger. “For them to be able to see and be given a license to create some local changes that could potentially have a bigger impact is really exciting.” Read more in the Saint Albans Messenger. 

 

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