One of the first things you see upon entering the main doors of Scarborough’s Dr. Norman Bethune Collegiate Institute is the student-run recycling station. Just off to one side of the school’s massive commons area, the recycling station is where the 70-plus members of the Bethune Environmental Action Team (BEAT) sort through a wide range of detritus dropped off by staff and students.They collect everything from wine corks, which are donated to local Girl Guides for craft projects, to spent printer cartridges, which are returned to the manufacturer for a rebate (last year’s rebates totalled about $300).

Down the hall and around the corner is a staff photocopy room, another place BEAT members spend a lot of their time before and after classes, sorting single-sided sheets of paper, which can be reused, from double-sided sheets that are ready for recycling. A notice on the wall reminds staff that only paper that is crumpled or contains staples, or confidential documents such as student information (and love notes, the students point out with a snicker), should go in the garbage. Everything else can be used again, one way or another.

The next stop on the tour of BEAT projects is the cafeteria, which bustles at lunchtime. In an effort to encourage more students to recycle their empty pop cans, the team replaced the large,blue bins that were rarely used with smaller, putty-coloured garbage cans, the kind normally seen at the end of driveways on garbage day. The only difference is that these garbage containers have holes the size of dinner plates cut into their lids so students can drop their cans in easily, without lifting a sticky lid or inhaling the fumes that come from within. “It was so smelly,” explains Grade 12 student Christina Lee-Chan.

It is an ingenious, if simple, solution, and one that only young people would think of. What’s more, it works, and the students have bags of recyclables they collect every day to prove it. This type of change and others like it have made the school a model for environmentalism in action and earned it a gold certification from the EcoSchools program of the Toronto District School Board (TDSB). Now in its third year of certifying schools, the program is one of many new models popping up across the province that are designed to reduce soaring energy bills while helping kids become ecologically literate — a concept that not only includes teaching how nature works, but also the idea that everything on our planet is interconnected and that the choices we make, whether personal or societal, can affect the water, soil and air on which we depend.

It should come as no surprise that this push is a reaction to government cutbacks and rising energy costs. For most boards with programs similar to the TDSB’s, the impetus was saving money. The Upper Grand District School Board’s Energy W.I.S.E. program emerged from a retrofit project to reduce energy consumption at the board’s 71 schools three years ago. After working with a private company to upgrade the heating, lighting and water systems in its buildings to make them operate more efficiently, the board shifted its focus to changing how staff and students use the buildings.

“The energy costs are more than $1 million for our board for one year, and it’s expected you can get five to 10 percent savings on that from behavioural changes, like if kids shut off the lights when they leave a room, shut off their computer monitors, that kind of thing,” explains Gregg Reekie, who is in charge of the board’s outdoor education program and chaired the Energy W.I.S.E. steering committee.“So we wanted to address the behavioural component and get the schools and students involved in energy saving.”

A program in place at both the Ottawa-Carleton District School Board and the Hastings and Prince Edward District School Board works the same way. Rose-Marie Batley, a retired superintendent with the Ottawa-Carleton board and now the executive director of EarthCARE, an organization that works with school boards to reduce their energy and waste costs, says as much as 10 percent of a school’s total utility costs is wasted through the behaviour of its occupants. “Five or six years ago when we started out, it was not uncommon for schools to leave 75 percent of their lights and computers on when they weren’t needed, overnight or even over the summer,” says Batley.

So one of EarthCARE’s main projects is Lights Off,Computer Off (LOCO), in which students conduct energy audits of their schools to see how many lights and computers are left on in rooms no one is using and whether blinds and drapes are closed after school hours to help retain heat. Under the guidance of a dedicated EarthCARE project manager, school teams work to reduce energy consumption by placing stickers on light switches and computers,  reminding people to turn them off, and conducting spot checks. In 2003/04, the first year of the LOCO program, the Ottawa-Carleton board saved an estimated $938,700. In 2004/05, with 98.7 percent of its 149 schools taking part, the savings amounted to $1.08 million.

According to Richard Christie, who, as the TDSB’s program coordinator of ecological literacy and sustainable development is in charge of EcoSchools, engaging students in conservation and environmental issues is the easy part. The real challenge is convincing the provincial government to fund environmental projects. “You’ve got this serious complacency at the ministry level,” says Christie.“Typically when schools implement a new program, if it’s a literacy program or a math program or something, the ministry gives school boards money for staff or resources.” Since that has not happened with environmental programs, says Christie, boards have had to go it alone.

When the TDSB was created in 1998 as an amalgamation of seven smaller boards in the Greater Toronto Area,money was tight for all programs beyond the traditional scope of reading, writing and arithmetic. Then, in 2002, the provincial government appointed a supervisor to oversee the board after trustees approved a budget with a $90-million deficit. Part of the supervisor’s eventual $36-million cuts included outdoor education, which did not bode well for environmentalists. But there was one bright spot: the amalgamated board adopted an environmental policy with two major commitments: to operate schools in a more environmentally responsible way and to increase students’environmental awareness.

Christie says the EcoSchools program is a response to those commitments and was inspired by a similar European model.The program consists of a five-step process that any school can follow, regardless of the size of its student population or bank account. The process involves establishing a team (which normally includes staff, students, caretakers and parents), conducting a school audit and then developing and implementing an action plan and evaluating its results.The core program focuses on reducing waste and saving energy. Points are awarded for completing each step of the process, as well as for achieving results from the action plan. From there, schools are encouraged to take on bigger projects that are part of the expanded program, such as a community cleanup or school grounds greening projects. Schools that score in the top 20 percent, usually by completing the core program and organizing two or three additional activities, earn a gold certification.

The BEAT students at Dr. Norman Bethune Collegiate say achieving gold certification is their proudest accomplishment to date. They say working toward that goal helped motivate them and gave them ideas for new projects to try. “I think doing small things within our school helps plant the seed for other students to think beyond the school and get involved in their community,” says Grade 12 student Alex Lin.“For example, in the photocopying rooms, if we just cut our usage by a third, we’d save almost $11,000 a year, which is a lot of money that can be used within our school. So doing small things like that helps create bigger changes and benefits our school and the environment.”

EcoSchools provides resources for every step of the way, from guides and online tracking tools for reducing energy and waste, to workshops for greening projects co-hosted by program partner Evergreen, a national nonprofit organization whose goal is to bring nature to cities through naturalization projects. Of the 558 schools in the Toronto board, 53 participated in 2004/05 (including 10 outdoor education centres). Of those, 30 received gold certification. Christie says the schools that took part were evenly distributed along the board’s learning opportunity index, which essentially ranks schools in terms of socioeconomic factors. “At the grassroots level, at the school level, there is huge demand for this kind of programming,” he says, regardless of the size or wealth of a school.

Besides collecting recyclables and making sure lights and computers are turned off, BEAT students at Dr. Norman Bethune Collegiate spend a fair bit of time fundraising. Projects that focus on reducing energy consumption and waste production require little money. But the bigger projects, such as the naturalized butterfly garden at the school, can be costly. Money can also be a challenge when it comes to maintaining board-wide programs. While the Upper Grand board’s Energy W.I.S.E. program and EarthCARE offer financial incentives, usually in the form of a small portion of the money the school saves from the projects, EcoSchools does not. And although money is not necessary for a successful EcoSchools program, having funds allows schools to buy more recycling cans, composting units and shrubs and trees for gardens, and fund trips and special activity days.

The idea of rewarding top-performing schools financially is something Christie is considering for the future, although he worries about sending students the wrong message: that they should be paid to take care of the environment instead of wanting to because they believe doing so is important. “There is a good case to be made to put some money in the hands of people doing the work[students, teachers and staff] so they can keep doing it. But on the other hand, I’m not sure we want to create a program where people are doing it because they’re getting money. We want people to do it because they think it’s the right thing and it’s good for kids,” says Christie.

Fewer than 10 percent of TDSB schools were involved in the program in 2004/05, a poor showing compared to the 98 percent participation rate in the Ottawa-Carleton board. Christie pegs this past year’s participation rate at around 15 percent. As such, he says his challenge is not to expand the program, arguing that participation will increase as word about its success and the savings that result from it spreads among students, teachers and principals. Instead, Christie’s focus is on integrating environmentalism more seamlessly into curriculum across all grades.

Although the EcoSchools and EarthCARE programs both have resources for teachers that are related to school curriculum in a range of subject areas, including English and art, the tendency is still for environmental issues to be relegated to geography or science lessons. “Next year, I’m hopeful we’ll have the funding to work with teachers in a more in-depth way, where we can work with them three or four times over the course of the year about what we mean by ecological literacy and how you design an effective lesson using the Ontario curriculum as it is right now,”says Christie.

There are other challenges to running a successful program. One of the big ones: having someone to keep it going. Reekie says that since the Upper Grand board let go of its energy coordinator due to budget constraints, the project has slumped. The program had gotten off to a good start with a student conference featuring David Suzuki and energy audits at schools throughout the board, but participation has flagged during the past couple of years. At the same time, Reekie says the board is close to finalizing a deal with a private company to do more ecological education, so he is hopeful that the project will regain its momentum.

Still, the enthusiasm of young people cannot be discounted as a great motivator. Stella Dasko, principal of Dr. Norman Bethune Collegiate, says she is impressed with the passion she sees in her BEAT students, whether they are educating teachers about composting and recycling or collecting recyclables.“They’re a strong, committed group of young people who are very community-minded and take their social responsibility very seriously,”she says.

BEAT students also make monthly presentations to children in feeder schools near Bethune to promote the club and get younger children interested in environmental issues. “Our goal is to help them become EcoSchools so they can form an environmental club in their own schools,” explains Christina Lee-Chan. BEAT members lead the younger students through demonstrations, for example, of how compact fluorescent light bulbs use less energy than incandescent light bulbs, and activities such as Recyclable Twister, in which kids must put a hand or foot on a recyclable product (instead of a coloured circle as in the usual Twister game).“To get kids on board, if you start with environmental concepts and this kind of activism at a young age, it’s definitely going to progress through high school,” says Grade 12 student Trevor Lin. “It’s easier to learn things like languages when you’re young, and I guess that applies to environmental concepts as well.”