Other Partnership Programs

The following are examples of successful partnerships that serve as waste reduction models for school districts and local jurisdictions.

California K-12 Schools Recycling Challenge
Keep California Beautiful’s California K-12 Schools Recycling Challenge provides a tool for school district recycling coordinators, teachers, student green teams and waste management professionals to engage their school community in recycling and waste reduction in a fun and friendly way. Environmental messages cannot always motivate action by themselves. Students love a competition: challenging the classroom next door, or joining forces to beat the cross district rival helps drive their desire to be part of the team. In the process, participation in the competition familiarizes students with a school’s recycling programs and hopefully instills in them a lifelong habit.

Throughout the site, you will find links to resources and information about successful waste prevention, composting, and recycling programs in schools throughout California.

The Climate Generation Program
The Climate Generation Program is a project-based competition connecting environmental education materials with climate action projects. It encourages teachers to integrate creative lesson plans or new curriculum into their classrooms to teach about our environment and helps students apply what they’ve learned in class by designing and implementing a project to reduce their school’s carbon footprint. This program makes an impact on the students, their school, their community, and the environment. Between October 2011 and February 3, 2012, high school classrooms or organizations need to register to participate in the program. This can be done electronically, using the Registration Form. There is no cost to participate.

CoolCalifornia.org
CoolCalifornia's goal is to provide resources to all Californians in order to reduce their environmental impact and take action to stop climate change. Realizing local governments, businesses, schools and individuals have different needs, they have customized pages for each audience, including schools. Join many school district officials, teachers, and students to stop global warming and save money by taking money saving actions to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. The Schools Toolkit is a one-stop shop to help school district officials, teachers, and students save money and protect the climate. This toolkit includes money saving actions, financial resources, climate calculators, climate-related curriculum, and recognition.

Go Green Initiative
The Go Green Initiative is a grassroots environmental program that unites parents, teachers and students to create a culture of conservation on campus. The program involves students at every level and takes a comprehensive approach to help schools evaluate every aspect of their environmental impact. It provides schools simple options and tools to examine everything from recycling to energy conservation.

Green Ribbon Schools Award Program
In conjunction with the U.S. Department of Education, the California Department of Education (CDE) is implementing a new Green Ribbon Schools Award Program to recognize schools that are taking a comprehensive approach to greening their school. A comprehensive approach incorporates and integrates environmental learning with maximizing positive environmental and health impacts. This award program involves a two-step process. First interested schools complete and submit the online application in order to be selected as a state nominee. CDE will evaluate schools based on their facilities' environmental impact and health and environmental education. The schools that are selected, will be asked to complete the second step of the process by providing additional information for the nominee package that will be forwarded to the U.S. Department of Education for consideration in being recognized as a Green Ribbon School.

The Green Schools Initiative
The Green Schools Initiative was founded in 2004 by parent-environmentalists who were concerned by how un-environmental their kids’ schools were and mobilized to improve the environmental health and ecological sustainability of schools in the U.S. It is essential to protect children’s health - at school and in the world beyond school - and the Green Schools Initiative works to catalyze and support “green” actions by kids, teachers, parents, and policymakers to eliminate toxics, use resources sustainably, create green spaces and buildings, serve healthy food, and teach stewardship.

California State PTA
(California Congress of Parents, Teachers, and Students, Inc) To protect the environment and human health, PTA urges its members to become knowledgeable about the environmental conditions in their schools and communities and about current efforts to protect or improve the local environment, both indoors and out. To facilitate this, California State PTA offers a versatile set of related tools including curriculum information, state resources and related PTA resolutions.

Service-Learning Waste Reduction Project
The Service-Learning Waste Reduction Project helps schools establish and promote their recycling, reuse, reduction and composting systems using the service-learning teaching strategy. The project connects California content standards with school site-specific waste reduction goals. Over the previous three years, the project worked with teams of teachers, custodians, administrators, and parents at elementary, middle, and high schools throughout Alameda County.

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