Following an extensive multiyear effort across the Harker community, The Harker School has now been recognized by as a Certified Green Business by the Bay Area Green Business Program. In addition to being a major sustainability goal, fulfilling the requirements for certification also is expected to reduce costs in a variety of ways.
“Aside from the primary goals of being a more environmentally sustainable institution and meeting Harker’s standard of modeling and teaching sustainability through our actions, CGB provides a report card,” said Jeff Sutton, Harker science teacher and a member of Harker’s Green Committee. “This report card provides positive feedback as to how much savings, both fiscal and in the reduction of our impact on the environment, the actions are generating. These numbers are estimates but still provide encouragement for continuance in the program.”
The effort to become a Certified Green Business began in late 2012, when the newly formed Green Committee was searching for a way to advance Harker’s sustainability goals. “[Harker head of school] Chris Nikoloff began the search for a tool to implement to gain better understanding of sustainability at Harker, including knowing what Harker was doing to be stewards of resources and looking for ways to improve the overall sustainability of the operation of the school,” Sutton said. “The CGB application provided an excellent framework because it was so comprehensive and very objective in the tasks needed to achieve CGB status.”
Preparation for the application process began in 2013 and lasted through the year. Applications for all four of Harker’s campuses were submitted in May 2014, and inspectors from Santa Clara County visited in June and noted what needed to be done to qualify for the certification.
The schoolwide effort to become certified lasted for the next two years, with key projects and initiatives occurring on all campuses. Shipping/receiving manager Bob Benge and business manager Clif Wilcox devised a more sustainable policy for school purchases. Stephen Martin, executive director of food services, worked with the Harker kitchen staff to acquire food products that had been sustainably produced, in addition to using more environmentally friendly paper products and discontinuing the use of polystyrene. Thanks to transportation supervisor Heather Armada, all of Harker’s vehicles now use recycled oil. Other projects included spearheading the use of Energy Star-rated electronics, using recycled paper for photocopying, examining the use of LED lighting and much more.
Harker’s Green Business certification is up for renewal in three years, and Sutton is confident that the school will maintain its dedication to sustainability. “As an institution of education, it is awesome to see Harker modeling ways to improve its sustainability in its relationship with the environment,” he said.
This article originally appeared in the summer 2014 Harker Quarterly.
In April, Harker instituted a new schoolwide program that separates waste into “wet” and “dry” categories. The initiative coincides with a system rolled out by the city of San Jose and Republic Services, which manages waste for commercial users in the area.
Labeled cans have popped up on every campus, along with signs indicating what kinds of waste go in each can. “Wet” waste includes food waste and used paper goods, such as napkins, tissues and paper food trays. “Dry” waste includes drink containers, clean paper and cardboard, and noncompostable food containers.
In addition to compliance with the city of San Jose and Republic Services, this initiative will help “divert as much of our trash toward recycling as possible,” said Diana Moss, upper school Spanish teacher and a member of Harker’s Green Committee. Making this a schoolwide effort will help ensure that students graduating from one campus to the next will be familiar with Harker’s trash procedures, she added.
“This contributes in a significant way to our green efforts,” said Kate Schafer, upper school science teacher and Green Committee member. “First, we’re making it possible for Republic Services to do their job of diverting material from the landfill, but it also gives us the possibility of assessing our production of waste and reducing it in the future through various efforts such as on-site composting, reduction in use of non-recyclable containers, etc.”
It may also have some financial benefits in the longer term. “Going forward, Harker could actually reduce its output from the campus by separating our white paper from compostable paper, and we could actually start giving that to a different vendor,” said committee member and upper school science teacher Jeff Sutton. “We can start composting. If we get good at it, we could take our own food waste and compost it into compost soil and then, ultimately, save money because we won’t need as many pickups per week.”
The labeled cans were set up during spring break in classrooms and strategic spots on each campus. Green Committee members have been working to get the word out. Lower school students were informed about the rollout during educational assemblies, and on April 22 – celebrated around the world as Earth Day – faculty and staff wore green and blue to show their support of the wet/ dry program. Meanwhile, middle school students took quizzes about the wet and dry classifications during their advisories. Upper school students were informed of the new procedures at the April 14 morning school meeting with a special video and presentation. A bulletin board display in the lunch area, featuring amusing photos of costumed students, also reminds everyone of the proper way to dispose of their trash.
So far, Schafer says, the roll out has been “a big success. Across as many campuses as we are and as many trash cans as we have, [when you] try to change a system, there’s a lot of components to it, there’s a lot of facilities-level changes that need to be made, a lot of education. I think the education part of it is ongoing and will continue to be.”
“On the whole, the community has really gotten behind our efforts,” said Green Committee member Margaret Huntley, a middle school math teacher. “People are pleased to have the opportunity to divert waste from landfill, particularly through the new composting collection. In particular, many of the students returning from exchange trips to Japan and China better understand the importance of protecting our resources and environment.”
Educating the community on the importance of adhering to the new program has been and remains a priority. “We see this new system as a journey, not something with a hard deadline,” said Huntley.
“The faculty and staff have been extremely cooperative and open to the new program,” said Robyn Stone, committee member and preschool STEM specialist. “They have asked great questions and come up with systems and strategies for wet/dry reclamation in their own classrooms and offices.” Preschool students have even discovered one additional benefit of the program: “Our preschoolers enjoy sorting out their lunch and snack items into ‘green’ and ‘blue’ bins,” Stone added.
Harker’s dedication to introducing the wet/ dry system effectively and on such a large scale has already received recognition from Republic Services, which gave Harker a recycling award in May. “We’ve had really a lot of positive feedback from Republic Services,” said Schafer. “They’re just so impressed with how serious we are about wanting to do this correctly.”
The wet/dry program is just one piece of the Green Committee’s – and the school’s – continued dedication to making Harker as environmentally responsible as possible. The lower and middle schools began adopting the upper school’s policy of eliminating the use of paper cups among students, faculty and staff. “We removed all paper cups from grades 4 and 5. They need to bring their own water bottles or use the water fountains,” said lower school art teacher Gerry-louise Robinson, another committee member. “After-school time has removed [paper] cups too.”
Paper cup usage at the middle school also has been “greatly reduced,” Huntley said, and the hope is that it will be eliminated on campus in the near future. In February, the middle school’s Green Club began a program to recycle Capri Sun drink containers by using a service called TerraCycle, which collects and recycles materials that are difficult to recycle. The money generated from this effort was donated to environmental programs.
At the preschool, much of the kitchen’s food waste has been converted into food for worms and rabbits at the campus’ farm area. In addition, “The facilities crew has diligently saved all of the schoolyard green waste in a compost pile, which has been rotting nicely all year,” Stone said. “We used that compost together with compost created by our worm colony in our garden beds.”
Perhaps the biggest recent step, however, was the Green Committee’s application to get Harker certified as a Green Business by the Bay Area Green Business Program. Getting certified was originally part of a longer-term plan, but the committee made the decision to apply after it realized how much progress it had made. “At the beginning of the year, we said we wanted to apply some time in the next three years,” said Schafer. “It turned out that we were a lot closer than we realized and there’s a lot of momentum right now to make change and a lot of people are really on board with trying to accomplish this.”
In addition to improved waste management, Sutton cited other improvements such as using more efficient light bulbs, and reducing the amount of printed material by putting information online and increasing electronic communications.
Although the committee had not yet heard from the California Green Business Program at press time, Schafer pointed out that the decision to apply was itself an indicator of just how far Harker has come in its green efforts thus far. “It may indeed take us another two years to have checked off all those boxes. We’ll have to see, but it’s a huge step,” she said.
Harker recently instituted a new schoolwide waste program that separates waste into “wet” and “dry” categories. The initiative coincides with a system rolled out by the city of San Jose and Republic Services, which manages waste for commercial users in the area.
Labeled cans have popped up on every campus, along with signs indicating what kinds of waste go in each can. “Wet” waste includes food waste and used paper goods, such as napkins, tissues and paper food trays. “Dry” waste includes drink containers, clean paper and cardboard, and non-compostable food containers.
In addition to compliance with the city of San Jose and Republic Services, this initiative will help “divert as much of our trash toward recycling as possible,” said Diana Moss, upper school Spanish teacher and a member of Harker’s Green Committee. Making this a schoolwide effort will help ensure that students graduating from one campus to the next will be familiar with Harker’s trash procedures, she added.
“This contributes in a significant way to our green efforts,” said Kate Schafer, upper school science teacher and Green Committee member. “First, we’re making it possible for Republic Services to do their job of diverting material from the landfill, but it also gives us the possibility of assessing our production of waste and reducing it in the future through various efforts such as on-site composting, reduction in use of non-recyclable containers, etc.”
The labeled cans were set up during spring break in classrooms and strategic spots on each campus. Green Committee members have been working to get the word out. Lower school students were informed about the rollout during educational assemblies, and on April 22 – celebrated around the world as Earth Day – faculty and staff wore green and blue to show their support of the wet/dry program. Meanwhile, middle school students have taken quizzes about the wet and dry classifications during their advisories. Upper school students were informed of the new procedures at the April 14 morning school meeting with a special video and presentation. A bulletin board display in the lunch area, featuring amusing photos of costumed students, also reminds students of the proper way to dispose of their trash.
Harker recently instituted a new schoolwide waste program that separates waste into “wet” and “dry” categories. The initiative coincides with a system rolled out by the city of San Jose and Republic Services, which manages waste for commercial users in the area.
Labeled cans have popped up on every campus, along with signs indicating what kinds of waste go in each can. “Wet” waste includes food waste and used paper goods, such as napkins, tissues and paper food trays. “Dry” waste includes drink containers, clean paper and cardboard, and non-compostable food containers.
In addition to compliance with the city of San Jose and Republic Services, this initiative will help “divert as much of our trash toward recycling as possible,” said Diana Moss, upper school Spanish teacher and a member of Harker’s Green Committee. Making this a schoolwide effort will help ensure that students graduating from one campus to the next will be familiar with Harker’s trash procedures, she added.
“This contributes in a significant way to our green efforts,” said Kate Schafer, upper school science teacher and Green Committee member. “First, we’re making it possible for Republic Services to do their job of diverting material from the landfill, but it also gives us the possibility of assessing our production of waste and reducing it in the future through various efforts such as on-site composting, reduction in use of non-recyclable containers, etc.”
The labeled cans were set up during spring break in classrooms and strategic spots on each campus. Green Committee members have been working to get the word out. Lower school students were informed about the rollout during educational assemblies, and on April 22 – celebrated around the world as Earth Day – faculty and staff wore green and blue to show their support of the wet/dry program. Meanwhile, middle school students have taken quizzes about the wet and dry classifications during their advisories. Upper school students were informed of the new procedures at the April 14 morning school meeting with a special video and presentation. A bulletin board display in the lunch area, featuring amusing photos of costumed students, also reminds students of the proper way to dispose of their trash.
Harker recently instituted a new schoolwide waste program that separates waste into “wet” and “dry” categories. The initiative coincides with a system rolled out by the city of San Jose and Republic Services, which manages waste for commercial users in the area.
Labeled cans have popped up on every campus, along with signs indicating what kinds of waste go in each can. “Wet” waste includes food waste and used paper goods, such as napkins, tissues and paper food trays. “Dry” waste includes drink containers, clean paper and cardboard, and non-compostable food containers.
In addition to compliance with the city of San Jose and Republic Services, this initiative will help “divert as much of our trash toward recycling as possible,” said Diana Moss, upper school Spanish teacher and a member of Harker’s Green Committee. Making this a schoolwide effort will help ensure that students graduating from one campus to the next will be familiar with Harker’s trash procedures, she added.
“This contributes in a significant way to our green efforts,” said Kate Schafer, upper school science teacher and Green Committee member. “First, we’re making it possible for Republic Services to do their job of diverting material from the landfill, but it also gives us the possibility of assessing our production of waste and reducing it in the future through various efforts such as on-site composting, reduction in use of non-recyclable containers, etc.”
The labeled cans were set up during spring break in classrooms and strategic spots on each campus. Green Committee members have been working to get the word out. Lower school students were informed about the rollout during educational assemblies, and on April 22 – celebrated around the world as Earth Day – faculty and staff wore green and blue to show their support of the wet/dry program. Meanwhile, middle school students have taken quizzes about the wet and dry classifications during their advisories. Upper school students were informed of the new procedures at the April 14 morning school meeting with a special video and presentation. A bulletin board display in the lunch area, featuring amusing photos of costumed students, also reminds students of the proper way to dispose of their trash.
This story originally appeared in the fall 2013 Harker Quarterly. Harker’s ongoing commitment to improving its environmental standards has led to the formation of the Green Committee, a group of faculty and staff working to formulate and execute a strategy toward making Harker a greener school both practically and culturally.
“The committee’s a way to … get people together to share ideas in terms of projects we want to do and how to carry out those projects,” said Jeff Sutton, the upper school science teacher who leads the committee along with fellow science teacher Kate Schafer.
The people who would eventually form the committee, which is made up of people from all of Harker’s divisions, first met in late 2012 to discuss a long-term plan for furthering Harker’s green efforts. The committee came up with seven areas in which Harker could improve: energy conservation, waste reduction, reducing the use of toxic chemicals, instituting more shuttles and encouraging carpooling to reduce pollution, improving water quality, creating greener schoolyards and improving student food choices in order to offer more healthy foods.
Prior to the forming of the committee, there were initiatives in place across Harker’s three campuses. “We wanted to bring all those initiatives together and really collect and collate our ideas and our efforts and make them unified across pre-K through 12,” said Chris Nikoloff, head of school. “It was really more of a way of honoring a lot of good work and just trying to bring it all together to take it to the next level.”
The committee is currently working to establish a baseline that will offer them a better picture of what needs to be done going forward, with a focus on energy usage and waste reduction. “One of the things that we have realized that we need to do is get more details than we did in our initial research,” said Schafer. “One of things that we’re going to be working on, with the help of other Green Committee members, is conducting some of those audits.”
In the coming year, the committee hopes to conduct an audit of all the waste that is created on the three K-12 campuses over a period of 24 hours and determine 1) how much of it could have avoided being sent to a landfill; 2) how much could have been recycled or composted; and 3) what portion did not need to be created at all. One future goal is to purchase an industrial composter and start a pilot composting program at the upper school. This would allow the campus to reduce all biodegradable food waste, including all paper cups and paper products, and quickly break them down into compost instead of discarding them as landfill fodder. At a meeting in January, the committee decided to launch an energy reduction campaign in the spring of 2013 to encourage stu- dents, faculty and staff to turn off lights and close laptops in order to reduce energy usage across all campuses. According to Sutton, the campaign yielded “mixed results,” as the energy bills from those months were roughly the same as previous months. “From our little experiment, it’s not people having their laptops plugged in so much,” said Sutton. “I’m sure that makes a difference, but there’s something bigger, like an air conditioner or a refrigerant or a heater that’s causing the draw.” The committee is looking into software that will assist in discovering where Harker has opportunities to become more energy efficient. Some progress has already been made in the form of lighting upgrades at the upper school and preschool campuses. “Over the course of the summer and into the coming year, all four of our campuses will have gone through a lighting energy efficiency audit by an independent PG&E vendor,” said Mike Bassoni, the school’s facility manager. “Through grant monies made available by PG&E, we have to date received more than $40,000 in energy-efficient lighting upgrades.”
Similar upgrades are also in store for the middle and lower school campuses, pending review. The upgrades to the upper school and preschool campuses alone are expected to save the school more than $33,000 a year in energy costs. Another crucial part of the Green Committee’s plans is to get student buy-in and involvement for the initiatives. “Once we figure out as a committee what our goals are, then I’m going to be the one that goes to the kids and says, ‘OK, we want to realize some goals, would you like to join us?’” said Diana Moss, upper school Spanish teacher and dean of the Class of 2015. Moss is being joined by upper school math teacher and Class of 2014 dean Victor Adler in this effort. Representatives from other campuses, including middle school math teacher Margaret Huntley, middle school history teacher Andy Keller, lower school math and science teacher Enni Chen and lower school art teacher Gerry-louise Robinson, all plan to get students on their respective campuses involved. During the spring 2013 semester, new water fountains were installed at the upper school that dispense filtered water and have replaced traditional bottled water dispensers. These are also part of an ongoing effort to reduce paper waste by encouraging students and staff to bring water bottles to use instead of paper cups, which will supplement other waste reduction efforts such as paper recycling and cell phone and battery drop-off stations. Faculty and staff are also being encouraged to get into the habit of bringing coffee mugs to work. In addition, a new student group called Brilliant Organizers of Students Sustainability (BOSS) has been formed and will be working with the Green Committee on student-led sustainability projects.
Over the summer, Moss had the opportunity to research how students at other schools participated in their schools’ green efforts. “They’re doing some amazing things. Kids are fired up and they’re actually leading these initiatives,” she said. Part of her plan to increase student involvement is to have them network and share ideas with students at other schools. “Eventually I see the Green Committee as being a mixed group of student leaders and faculty and staff who are also interested in sustainability,” she said. The committee hopes that one day Harker can be certified as both a California Green Business and a Green Ribbon school. To do so will require fulfilling requirements set by both programs. “Schools are particularly challenging because they do so many different things,” Schafer said. “We have pools, we have food service, we have all of these different components. We’re almost a like a little mini-city in and of ourselves.” Even though their goals may be lofty, Sutton said that having “big goals” can offer a point of inspiration necessary to motivate the Harker community into making a big push to make the school more environmentally responsible. “That’s one of our major goals going forward, too: to make this Green Committee not a committee but an ideology, where it lives beyond the life of the people who are here now.”
This article was originally published in the spring 2013 Harker Quarterly.
They call themselves “trash warriors.”
Upper school history teacher Carol Zink discovered the California Adopt-a-Highway program and made Harker aware of it. Now she is joined by fellow faculty, parents and students in the litter roundup. The last trash pickup day took place on Feb. 16.
Over the years, the trash warriors have picked up some interesting finds during their trashathons, including a loaded shotgun shell (turned over to the police), a pair of nearly new high heels, an expensive motorcycle helmet, and a rubber Halloween mask.
This past April, Harker hosted the first Green Teen Summit, featuring appearances by 350.org founder Bill McKibben and the co-founder of BioTour, Ethan Burke. Harker journalism students put together this video report of the event!
The Harker School will host the first Green Teen Summit, a student-organized conference for Bay Area high school students interested in environmental activism, on Sat., April 14, from 10 a.m. to 3 p.m. The half-day conference, held at the upper school campus, will feature inspirational speakers and a wealth of resources to help young people get involved with environmental efforts at school and abroad. Bill McKibben, founder of 350.org, will be one of two keynote speakers at the event. Called “the planet’s best green journalist” by Time magazine and “probably the country’s most important environmentalist” by the Boston Globe, McKibben has authored a dozen books on environmental issues, and started 350.org as a grassroots initiative to end the climate crisis. Since 2009, 350.org has organized 15,000 rallies in 189 countries. The conference’s second keynote speaker, Ethan Burke, is co-founder and director of operations for BioTour, a nonprofit organization that travels across the country via school buses modified to run on vegetable oil and solar energy. BioTour has crisscrossed the nation for two-and-a-half years, giving presentations on the environment at more than 150 universities, high schools and other venues. In addition to the speakers, the Green Teen Summit will offer training and resources provided by the Alliance for Climate Education, which organizes high school assemblies on climate-related issues. Students will also be able to enjoy lunch with green business leaders and attend workshops. The Green Teen Summit was organized by Harker students Daniela Lapidous and Shreya Indukuri, both grade 12, who received a grant in 2009 to improve Harker’s energy efficiency. They used the grant money to place insulating film on upper school classroom windows and start an organic garden. Later, they were instrumental in getting smart meters installed at the lower and upper school campuses to monitor and reduce energy usage. The students have received extensive press coverage for their efforts, and appeared at the Clinton Global Initiative last year as part of a keynote panel. This event is open to all high school students and campus green club advisors. A continental breakfast and vegetarian lunch is included in the ticket price. Tickets are $10 for students and $15 for adults (plus a nominal ticketing fee) and can be purchased at the Green Teen Summit’s Eventbrite page.
This story was originally published in the May 2008 issue of Harker News. “Going Green” was the theme of the third annual Harker Research Symposium held in March 2008 on the Saratoga campus. Over 300 attended and 50 students from the middle and upper schools gave presentations. Poster sessions covered diverse topics from new and innovative approaches for generating and saving energy, to reporting on the effects of cell phone conversations on drivers’ reaction times. Paper presentations also covered a wide range of topics including research for new cancer therapies and the effects of farming on river water quality. The sessions featured presentations by our Intel and Siemens semifinalists, the J8 team, three Harker alumni and students from Lynbrook High School in San Jose and Galt High School from Sacramento.” Sponsors were Applied Materials, Google and Hewlett-Packard. Students from San Jose State University demonstrated Phantastic Physics, and Santa Clara University sent their solar decathlon team. Of special interest was a comprehensive exhibit describing the eco-friendly building techniques used in the new science and technology building. Symposium keynote speaker Geoff Green, founder of Students on Ice, a nonprofit organization that takes groups of students from around the world on unique educational trips to the Poles, took the audience on an inspiring and unforgettable voyage to Antarctica and the Arctic, recounting his adventures with orcas and penguins, polar bears and Inuit elders. Anita Chetty, science department chair and event organizer, said the symposium exceeded her wildest hopes. She was thrilled by the sense of energy, excitement and enthusiasm that was palpably present throughout the day. “The kids were so marvelous,” she said. “They came here and do this for the sheer joy of sharing their experiences and learning from each other.”