Learning Goes Green at Phillips Exeter Academy (NH)

With more than 80 percent of our students living on our southern New Hampshire campus, Phillips Exeter Academy (PEA) is in a unique position to teach and model environmental awareness and responsibility 24 hours a day, seven days a week. We have tried to make our students as well as our faculty and staff aware that environmental issues are everyone’s concerns, all the time. Over the past several years, the academy has paid particular attention not only to saving energy in our 29 different dormitories and dozens of classroom and administrative buildings, but also to educating everyone about the myriad issues involved in creating a sustainable environment.

Mission and planning

An Environmental Mission Statement

The school is especially fortunate to have a board of trustees who takes environmental issues very seriously. Perhaps the most important advancement in the school's green efforts has been the academy's environmental mission statement. Crafted by the trustees with input from students, faculty, and staff, and adopted by the full board of trustees in May 2004, the statement reads:

Phillips Exeter Academy must be committed to stewardship of the environment. Recognizing we are all but one small part of the natural world, we must value, protect, preserve, and replenish natural resources. While our actions are local, our reach is global.

We must foster a culture of environmental awareness, which should be integral to our community in all venues of daily life, on and off campus — where we learn, where we work, where we live, and where we play. In practice, we need to respect our environment, recycle, and reduce our consumption to ensure that the natural resources we treasure are preserved and sustained for the future.

As an institution, our priorities, decisions, and actions will be informed by their environmental impact. We should pay particular attention to the use of our land, the construction and renovation of our facilities, our consumption of energy and other resources, and our choices of transportation.

The academy must educate our entire community about environmental issues and sound environmental practices. To address that part of the academy’s mission that seeks to graduate young people “whose interest in others and the world around them surpasses their self concern,” we must be vigilant in our efforts to prepare future generations for stewardship of the environment.

This statement and the commitment from the entire community that it reflects, provide a firm foundation on which future generations of Exeter students, faculty, and staff will continue to build a community that continues working toward sustainability.

Leading the Way at Exeter — the Environmental Task Force

The Environmental Task Force (ETF) is a committed group comprised of faculty, students, staff, and a trustee, who work with the sustainability coordinator to oversee our school's green efforts. They meet several times each term to stay current on all of the sustainability initiatives on campus and coordinate efforts.

Curriculum

Exeter takes seriously the notion of practicing environmental responsibility on a daily basis, and strives to teach this by example. But the school is also concerned with what it teaches in its classrooms; specifically about the challenges students will face in building a more sustainable world in their lifetime.

During three years of intense curricular review, the Exeter faculty considered introducing environmental study into the curriculum. While that specific proposal was not voted in, several elements remain under consideration by the Exeter faculty, including how best to integrate environmental study across the different disciplines and throughout the grade levels. Currently, much of the environmental study at Exeter is concentrated in senior-level courses with a specific focus on green issues, though we have recently added a sustainability component to our "junior studies" course, required for all incoming freshmen.

In June 2005, 14 teachers from seven different departments met for a week to learn firsthand how environmental issues are currently being taught in other disciplines and to consider together how to move ahead on a more comprehensive path.

Community Service and Outreach

Sustainable Dining Project

Faculty and students eat three meals together each day, making the dining experience yet another setting for education about sustainability. Campaigns to reduce energy consumption and food waste, and to increase the amount of local/organic food we buy, are all underway. We are continually looking for ways to further decrease our impact, including improved recycling and composting systems.

The School Garden

Another outlet for environmental education, the school garden — a 20 X 40-foot plot — has been a very hands-on experience for students. With more than 40 varieties of fruits and vegetables, the garden has become a living classroom. The student farm and garden club works on the plot from early April through October, planting and cultivating the crops, every Wednesday and Sunday afternoon. Though there isn't enough food produced to be served in the dining halls, the garden is open to community members to share in the harvest.

The Exchange

The Exchange is a place where PEA community members can drop off unwanted, reusable items and acquire “new” items. The Exchange includes items from school supplies, small electronics, CDs, and DVDs, to clothes, shoes, posters, lamps, rugs, and more. There is also a station for nontraditional recyclables, compact fluorescent light bulbs, ink cartridges, cell phones, batteries, and small electronics.  One hundred percent of the proceeds go to a different charity each month. Run by student volunteers, the Exchange is a great venue for educational outreach: Informational posters line the walls, educating patrons about consumerism and sustainability while they shop.

Student Opportunities and Campus Operations

Getting Students Involved: "E-Proctors," "The Environmental Action Committee," and "The Carbon Committee"

Our efforts have been greatly enhanced by the work of the environmental proctors (e-proctors), a group of student "green" leaders, who work with their fellow dorm mates and staff, to maintain current programs and find new ways to conserve resources and recycle. The e-proctors meet weekly for 50 minutes, with the sustainability coordinator and the E-Proctor Board, a group of five to seven students who help run the e-proctor program. During meetings, e-proctors learn about environmental issues, listen to guest speakers, have discussions, and work on different campus environmental projects. Projects include, helping reduce food waste in dining halls by going "tray-less"; working on implementing a "No Idling" policy on campus; and starting a secondhand store on campus called, "The Exchange." All e-proctors are also expected to convey the importance of sustainability to those with whom they live.

The Environmental Action Committee (EAC) works to educate the community about global environmental issues, hosting an Earth Fest each fall, and Earth Day celebration each spring. EAC facilitates forums, guest speakers, movie screenings, and demonstrations, and is also responsible for the biweekly publication, The Gifford Pinchot Review (GPR). The GPR is filled with world news on environmental issues and distributed around campus through the e-proctors.

Another student group newly formed in 2006, the Carbon Committee (CC) is specifically focused on the problem of global warming, and the academy's carbon footprint. A 54-page carbon neutrality proposal was written and presented to the trustees in May 2007. While that was a major focus for the group, taking an entire academic year to complete, the CC now focuses on educating the community about the different aspects of global warming, from economic and environmental, to social justice problems.

Bringing Sustainability Alive: The Green Cup Challenge

To bring a spirit of competition and fun to our energy saving efforts, the academy has developed the Green Cup Challenge (GCC). What started out as an on-campus, inter-dorm energy conservation competition in 2004, has turned into an interscholastic challenge with more than 30 schools participating in 2008. While the challenge to meet an overall 10 percent reduction in electrical energy consumption was not met, the 32 schools did reduce consumption by an estimated $80,000, preventing an estimated 1.2 million pounds of carbon dioxide from being produced and emitted into the atmosphere. At Exeter, the GCC has become a campus-wide educational program, using events such as documentary screenings, speakers, and trivia nights to educate the community about global warming solutions.

Next steps

The Future

While much has been accomplished on the sustainability front at Exeter, much work remains. As we look to the next few years, we will begin exploring ways to replace our antiquated heating facility, updating our recycling system to include food waste composting, and incorporating sustainability education into curriculum. From conducting a sustainability and stewardship assessment to negotiating an environmental master plan, PEA is committed to integrating sustainability into all facets of life at Exeter.

Contact: Jennifer Wilhelm
sustainability@exeter.edu

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