The Next Step

Now that I have effectively compiled a list of accomplishments that SAJE and the Green Committee have claimed, its time to see if these changes have actually been implemented. Clearly, the biggest topic here is the cafeteria. What exactly has the Green Committee done to make the cafeteria more environmentally conscious? For this, several people have suggested I talk to Sonya Elder, director of food services for the school department. Apparently, being in charge of the Brookline cafeterias, she was highly involved in the changes made by the Green Committee and several recent changes as well. What I've seen for myself recently has been a decline in the policies originally proposed and implemented by SAJE and the Green Committee. Particularly the reusable dishware. The ceramic plates and plastic baskets are practically gone since so many students were in the habit of leaving them outside or throwing them in the trash. However I've noticed that the recycling policy for recycling bottles is still around in the cafeteria. And people use it a lot. I also want to talk about what could almost be called a cultural phenomenon where students and teachers alike a trying desperately hard to reduce their paper use. Many teachers, especially in the language department I've noticed, are making tremendous efforts to translate almost their entire course, aside from the occasional worksheet and of course the tests, online. My Spanish teacher, Sr. Mendez, has been using a cool website called Voice Thread to have verbal conversations online about specific topics. My Philosophy teacher, Mr. Dickerman, has even raised enough money to buy his own set of class computers to use with google docs and gmail so that people can read articles and take notes online at home and read them during class. And obviously, you (Mr. Fischer) are a big fan of using the internet as well.

Responses to my Emails

I had previously requested information from several people highly involved in the green initiative at Brookline High School by email. When I checked my email the next day, I was happy to see that I had received several responses. Mr. Grande responded offering to meet with me later in the week. He informed me that Ms. Mary Minott, a social worker at Brookline High School, would be more qualified to comment on the successes of SAJE's Green Committee. Although I had known that Ms. Minott was involved in the green initiative (you had recommended I talk to her after my first blog post) I had no idea that she was actually in charge of the Green Committee. This was news to me. Mr Grande then went on to list what he considered the Green Committee's major accomplishments. These were:

• Sustainable dining practices (including reusable plates, recyclable plates, locally grown food, and less meat)

• Recycling (Toter Tuesday)

• Paper and plastic bottle reduction (Through the effective encouragement of teachers and students to reduce the amount of paper they used for school work)

• Climate Action Day (In addition to its normal methods of raising awareness, which include word of mouth, email and facebook and other online social networks, and posters and images around the school.)

This is already a great deal of information. After sending Mr. Grande a thank you email, I went on to read Rachel Sandalow-Ash and Sophie Lazaar's responses. In addition to a similar list, they explained to me the reason for the split from the SAJE group. The two are still highly intertwined, but the idea was that much more could get done if the problem was attacked from many different angles at the same time. Their committee was more about research ways to have a sustainable education environment while SAJE was more about spreading the word and implementing changes that their committee would research, explain, and try to facilitate.

I went on to contact Mary Minott and let her know about my project. She has not yet responded, but if she does not, I expect the students involved will be just as willing to talk to me about it themselves.

Getting Started

I sent out several emails to set up meetings or get preliminary information from people involved in the green initiative at Brookline High School. My first instinct was of course to shoot Mr. Grande an email, him being the leader of the SAJE organization. As I looked deeper and talked to a couple of my friends, I was notified that another group had branched off from SAJE's Climate Action Committee. The Environmental Action Committee, founded and run by Rachel Sandalow-Ash and Sophie Lazaar has been equally involved in the fight against global warming, particularly recently. I was also interested in talking to the Environmental Sciences teacher at Brookline High School, Ms. Brown, to whom I had been directed by several of my friends, students in her class. She should be a good source for a background of the issues, but most likely less about the actual action being taken to lower carbon emissions at Brookline High School.

In my email to Mr. Grande, I explained the project I was doing and asked him if he was interested in giving me an overview of the issues and what Students for Action and Justice in Education (SAJE) and their Climate Action Committee had actually done regarding these issues (preferably besides simply raising awareness about the problems). To Rachel Sandalow-Ash and Sophie Lazaar, I posed similar questions in addition to questions  regarding the reasons for their separation from the SAJE group and an explanation of how the two groups worked together. For Ms. Brown I, aside from the typical questions, I asked whether or not this was a big aspect of her class and how well she thought students at Brookline High School understood the challenges and what they could do to help. I wanted her to evaluate the attitude of Brookline High students towards this green initiative. I also asked her for a list of people I could try to talk to in order to go further in depth. We'll see where this takes me from here.

First Post

With this blog, I hope to provide an in depth analysis of the effects of efforts by student and teacher organizations like the SAJE Climate Action Committee or the separate "Environmental Action Committee" that it spawned. This study will deal with both the awareness aspect and the actual policy-change aspect of the transformations (or lack there-of) for which these groups are responsible. I was inspired mostly by the Climate Action Day held recently in the auditorium. The particular presentation I visited aroused a lot of discontent among the crowd who deemed it "socialist" and (quite fairly) extremely hypocritical. The particular video clip was called "the story of stuff" which I had known previously for being hard hit by critics as being childish and naive as well as patronizing and hypocritical (perfectly in line with the stereotypical upper class Brookline liberal). The presentation itself was not made by the SAJE group, but the fact that the group was presenting highly hypocritical material called into question whether they themselves practice what they preach.


Some of the things I hope to do are:

• Talk to some SAJE people about what they think they've accomplished so far and then follow up and investigate those claims.
• Acquire a timeline of their accomplishments over the years.
• Interview the cafeteria lunch ladies about the effects of the cafeteria reforms made several years ago.
• Develop a deeper understanding of the general position of the student body regarding the Green Initiative.
  

By the end of this I hope to have a concrete understanding of what the Green Initiative at BHS has changed for the better and what it has cost us. I will then evaluate the initiative as either a success or failure defined by criteria I will set forth. Finally, I will provide several ideas for a potential plan for improving or maximizing the effects of the Green Initiative.