Below is a text-only version of several short excerpts of the report. A web compatible version of the complete report can be downloaded from the bottom of this page.
An Evaluation of the
Sustainable Schools Project 2004-05:
Lawrence Barnes Elementary School
Prepared for
Shelburne Farms
The Vermont Education for Sustainability Project &
The Place-based Education Evaluation Collaborative
Prepared by:
Amy L. Powers
& Program Evaluation & Educational Research (PEER) Associates
January 15, 2005
The Sustainable Schools Project (SSP) is a partnership program of Shelburne Farms and Vermont Education for Sustainability (VT EFS). The project uses sustainability as the integrating context on a school-wide level, seeking to connect science, literacy, ecology, and community. SSP focused its first school year (2002-2003) piloting its program in one urban elementary school in Burlington, Vermont. In its second year, SSP continued its intensive work with the same elementary school while beginning to make inroads into its next elementary school site on the other side of Burlington. During its third year of programming, SSP has been working intensively with its second elementary school while providing occasional follow-up support to its pilot school.
Evaluation of SSP began with the program’s inception at Champlain Elementary School in Summer 2002. SSP staff invited systematic program evaluation from the start of its project in order to better understand the successes and challenges of their process of program development and implementation, and in order to measure the degree to which SSP’s short-term projected outcomes were attained. The second year of evaluation continued to monitor progress at Champlain Elementary School in terms of the program’s staying power, the integration of literacy and sustainability, and impacts on faculty and students. The second evaluation cycle also involved gathering baseline survey data for the newer SSP school, Barnes Elementary. This report, one component of the third evaluation cycle, provides an in-depth, qualitative assessment
of the initial status of Barnes Elementary School. (A separate report this year will contain an analysis of program staying power at Champlain Elementary School.)
Throughout the evaluation process SSP staff played an active role in structuring and contributing to the evaluation in order to increase the likelihood that evaluation processes and products will be both appropriate and useful for stakeholders. In addition to the evaluators’ interviews and observations, the SSP staff discussed and recorded monthly reflections about their work at both schools. This latter form was refined this year to better meet the needs of both evaluators (data collection and analysis) and program staff (on-going reflection and record-keeping).
Conclusions
The fact that Barnes Elementary School serves a culturally diverse, low income and largely socially disenfranchised population presents both challenges and opportunities for SSP. On the one hand, there are cultural and language barriers, parent participation has historically been low, the urban physical environment is less conducive than a suburban environment would be to outdoor exploration, and student behavior management is a struggle for teachers. The added pressure of testing mandates only exacerbates teachers’ stresses. On the other hand, the marginalization of this community makes it ripe for positive intervention and support. Teachers were overwhelmingly positive about having SSP in their school, expressing enthusiasm for the skills, resources, and assistance offered by the SSP staff. Many teachers were also impressed by
the students’ receptivity to SSP’s style of tangible, place-based learning.
SSP is embraced by the school at an early stage, with teachers calling on SSP staff for assistance and using SSP’s presence as an excuse to finally tackle larger community projects that have been on hold. Perhaps equally indicative of the potential for the project to flourish was the level of teacher enthusiasm and the degree of optimism about its potential to help them meet internal school goals. This receptivity stands in contrast to the reluctance, reticence, or even resistance people often express when faced with a new project or change in general. Parents have come to the school for evening presentations more than they had in the past, and the school is beginning to get positive media attention and an improved reputation in the community.
Where Champlain Elementary’s SSP work generally emphasized the environment or natural community, Barnes Elementary seems poised to emphasize the equity or social community aspect of sustainability. The Quality of Life Index project is a key example of the potential for Barnes to succeed with SSP---the project spanned the whole school, involved children teaching other children, encompassed math and literacy, brought parents and community partners into the school, and was borne of a teacher who, at first, was self-reportedly “clueless” about what SSP was about.
With literacy and mathematics testing a big focus area for Barnes teachers, SSP will need to continue to refine its ability to promote sustainability as an integrating concept throughout the curriculum. It will be important for the teachers to see the SSP model as a way to teach to state and national standards in an engaging way, while at the same time re-integrating aspects of the curriculum such as science and social studies that have been somewhat neglected during this testing era.
At this very early stage in the process, it may seem premature to discuss the staying power of SSP at Barnes, but in a school with time and resource constraints it is prudent to begin considering how the school might continue the mission of SSP once SSP staff is no longer involved. The strong receptivity on the part of the teachers is likely to be partially a result of the fact that any assistance is welcome when there are challenges in the classroom. It will be important for SSP staff to constantly ask themselves, “How will they do this without my help?”
The potential for SSP to help Barnes make positive changes is great. The stakes, however, are high, and so the potential for disappointment is also great. An earthy metaphor might be aptly applied to an analysis of SSP’s potential at Barnes: The goal of the SSP staff should be to choose the hardiest seeds and find the sunniest, most fertile soil in which to plant them, but to see that the teachers, students, administration, and community are the ones who water the garden, pull the weeds, apply the compost, and in the end reap the bounty of the harvest.
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