Alex Strand reported this story on assignment for the Vermont Community News Group. The Community News Service is a program in which University of Vermont students work with professional editors to provide content for local news outlets at no cost.
Students at Shelburne Community School had a big problem: The campus chicken coop was heated by a long electrical cord that would get unplugged to mow the lawn.
The industrious middle-schoolers came up with a solution. They proposed a solar-powered heater to keep their feathered friends — not only at the school but also those living in coops at the students’ homes — safe from the cold.
This was one of the projects created in recent years through the Cultivating Pathways to Sustainability initiative at Shelburne Community School. The program connects Vermont schools to coordinators at Shelburne Farms and Up for Learning, a national organization that helps educators increase student engagement, to teach the future generation about sustainability and climate change.
The program runs the entire school year, during which students conceive projects to address poverty, pollution and other hard problems in their own communities. A couple of years ago during the COVID-19 pandemic, about 300 Shelburne Community School students in 7th and 8th grades tackled the challenge of “fast fashion,” which refers to the manufacturing of low-cost, often disposable clothing usually made overseas.
For 20 years, Jen Cirillo has been the director of professional learning at the Institute for Sustainable Schools at Shelburne Farms, working with educators to build climate-related lessons into curricula.
“The goal really is for the students to really get a deep sense of what’s happening in their community before they try to make any change,” Cirillo said. “They’re building relationships with community partners. So it could look like emailing community partners and trying to learn about what are the needs of the community.” The program focuses on the 17 UN sustainable development goals, such as reducing poverty, addressing gender inequality or developing affordable and clean energy.
Faced with the daunting problem of climate change and a future imperiled by a warming planet, the program seeks to create a space for students to take action and give feedback to instructors. The 18 students at Shelburne Community School volunteered to take on leadership roles and help instruct their peers.
The students have shared feedback that speaks to their sense of empowerment in the program, according to Cirillo. “This is the first time that I feel like my voice was really listened to,” she said, recounting their comments. “This is the first time that I felt like I could contribute to the improvement of my community in a meaningful way.”
Following a program-wide kickoff at the start of the school year, each school follows a curriculum specific to its students, with core learning subjects in common, based off of the previous 17 sustainable development goals.
“I would say that Cultivating Pathways to Sustainability is really rooted in project-based learning and is rooted in youth-adult partnership,” said Katie Ingraham, program director at Up for Learning, which is based in Waterbury and works with schools across the country. “We create
cross-generational relationships that have shared power, shared responsibility and shared decision making.”
Pathways to Sustainability ends with a virtual “retreat” for students in the program nationwide to recognize their hard work in their own communities. For the middle-schoolers, the coordinators said, the program blurs the sharp divide between their classrooms and their communities, while they learn about global topics crucial to their futures.
“I’m hoping that they have a sense of collective agency,” Cirillo said, and realize they’re “not just alone.”
Instead, she continued, they can say to themselves, “In this group and my school and as a group of young people, we could really make a difference.”