Sustainability
Encouraging down-to-earth students
Signs dotting the campus — among them, “Monarch Butterfly Waystation” and “First Nations Garden” — alert visitors to the many ways Paideia reflects a stalwart commitment to sustainability and the excitement that students feel about environmental stewardship.
Taking the Lead
Paideia’s Framework of Values encourages “students to take responsibility for their own immediate environment and for advocating preservation and protection of the natural world.” Taking the lead on this issue comes naturally because sustainability fulfills a deeply felt communal need, helping us live our values of empathy, humility, a concern for justice and a dedication to service.
Look Anywhere
Anywhere you look, sustainability initiatives are on view. As Elementary students excitedly run to the recycling center with paper, cardboard and plastic. Through classwork inspiring future environmentalists. On a campus whose repurposed buildings testify to the value of reusing and recycling. And we never stop pushing ourselves to do better — new buildings go beyond LEED certification, and conversations are ongoing about using permaculture methods for campus maintenance.
‘Sow’ many ways to learn about sustainability
In 2012, Paideia hired an urban agriculture coordinator, and in 2019 the establishment of Pi Farm in East Atlanta created a lab unlike any other. Students learn firsthand about the synergistic relationships between growing crops, eating, raising animals, recycling waste and ensuring nutritional and environmental benefits.
Today, the Urban Ag program involves a range of faculty creating curricular and cross-curricular activities that reinforce STEAM skills and principles, introduce environmental and sustainability themes, and tie to the school’s central subjects.
Korri Ellis lit a fuse with additional ideas and directions, coming aboard as sustainability coordinator in 2016.
She teaches “Visualizing Environmental Injustice,” helping students pinpoint environmental injustice hotspots using online mapping and analysis software. “It’s important for students to understand how different demographics are more deeply impacted by environmental harm and our responsibility as citizens of the world to protect and advocate for those who are more susceptible to environmental disasters and harm,” says Ellis.
Illuminating this bigger picture is also key to a High School marine science class Ellis teaches in alternation with the class “Humans & the Environment.” The class on marine science gave McKinley Hale ’24 a glimpse of where she wanted to take her career. For students in landlocked Atlanta, it has been revelatory.
Notes Hale, “This class helps us understand how everything is connected and how what we do in big cities impacts the ocean, even if we are not close to water.”
Ellis also lends her expertise to other faculty, recently helping a class design “Project City Zen & Barrier Islands,” a functioning, stable and peaceful society. In all the classes, hope for a better future carries the day, and students learn that partnership, determination and consistency are needed to advance sustainability goals
Our oldest citizens meet our newest global citizens
Widening the aperture beyond Paideia and Atlanta is key. Ellis teaches “Hidden Histories: The Gullah Geechee Then and Now” in advance of the winter Alt Break trip. The Gullah Geechee, inhabitants of the Southeast’s coastal areas and sea islands, are descendants of enslaved Africans whose presence has created distinctive arts, crafts, foodways, music and language.
“We stood on the same beach where people stepped off the boat, and I absorbed how people were brought here against their will yet still created something beautiful in the space they were given. I also saw the ocean for the first time; in its vastness, I realized nature’s power,” says Partage Cadette ’24.
Chloe, on the student alt break trip.
Widening the aperture beyond Paideia and Atlanta is key. Ellis teaches “Hidden Histories: The Gullah Geechee Then and Now” in advance of the winter Alt Break trip. The Gullah Geechee, inhabitants of the Southeast’s coastal areas and sea islands, are descendants of enslaved Africans whose presence has created distinctive arts, crafts, foodways, music and language.
Chloe '24Today I was able to come in contact with knowledge that I never would have been able to receive if not for the class and conversations that we had before the trip. We came into this space to learn and have an open mind and for this first day I think we have achieved that. Acknowledging the oral history of Sapelo Island was something we focused on. And experiencing everything, not just learning about it but experiencing it first hand in large wide expanses and in small spaces.