Green Initiatives
Environmental Education
Students at City Schools learn about the natural world through experiential learning projects that take them outside to schoolyard and beyond.
Journey North Tulip Project
First and second graders at all elementary schools participate in the Journey North tulip project, an international science experiment where students across the northern hemisphere plant tulip bulbs in their Journey North Test Gardens each fall. When the plants emerge and bloom, the children input their observations online to announce that spring has arrived in their part of the world.
Students discover the relationship between climate and geography as they watch the arrival of spring move across the globe. More at the Journey North website.
Camp Albemarle
All CCS 4th grade students take a field trip to Camp Albemarle to learn about watershed issues through field-based activities. The students use large nets called kick seines to capture macroinvertebrates living in the sediment bottom of the Moorman’s River. Different macroinvertebrates are found in healthy and unhealthy waterways. As the students identify the macroinvertebrates they capture, they are able to rate the river's water quality.
At Camp Albemarle, the 4th graders also examine 3D small-scale models of watersheds known as Enviroscapes. The Enviorscapes tangibly demonstrate the concept of a watershed and how land use and various types of pollution affect water quality.
The Enviroscape lesson is followed by soil box experiments where the students test the erosion capacity of bare soil and soil covered with plants or mulch. The experiments provide a visual demonstration of how water quality is improved when plants help filter run-off. Throughout the Camp Albemarle visit, students use creativity and their five senses to record the sights, smells and sound of nature and express their impressions through poems, sketches and narratives about their day.
Buford Schoolyard Garden
At Buford Middle School, students have year-round access to an organic garden classroom. The City Schoolyard Garden at Buford is fully integrated into the seventh grade science curriculum and provides curricular opportunities for the school’s eighth grade. A fulltime Garden Educator leads students as they practice organic gardening and relate lessons learned in the garden to concepts in ecology and life science, verbal and written communication, biology, cooking, art, and marketing. In the summer, youth from the nearby the Boys & Girls Club help maintain the garden and learn how to grow vegetables. Schoolyard gardens and other outdoor classrooms are being developed across the division.
Solar Photovoltaic Array on CHS
In spring 2011, the City of Charlottesville was awarded a grant from the Virginia Department of Mines, Minerals and Energy to install a solar photovoltaic system on a section of roof at Charlottesville High School. A group of teachers is working with the City’s facilities maintenance staff to develop plans for integrating the system into curriculum and instruction.
McIntire Park Herpetofauna Survey
photo courtesy of Rick Wellbeloved-Stone
Through this project, CHS biology students are conducting a herpetofauna (amphibian and reptile species) survey of McIntire Park. They will use their data to create a herptofauna field guide for the Park and a GIS map of the Park indicating the distribution of species, habitat parameters, and recreational usage, among many other thematic layers.
BACON “Best All-Around Club of Nerds”
The CHS Science Club (aka BACON, Best All-around Club of Nerds) was named the Top Team in NASA’s 2011 Balloonsat High Altitude Flight competition. The BACON team was among four high school teams selected as finalists in the spring, the second year in a row that the CHS team was selected for the BalloonSat competition. The CHS experiment was called "The Effect of Near-Space on Solar-Powered Climate Control.” During flight days, the student teams tracked and recovered their experiments, then presented findings at the BalloonSat symposium. Teams were evaluated on participation during the launch, research presentations, and a final report about their experiment’s results.
Learning Outside the Bricks
Design professionals at the Charlottesville Community Design Center’s Design Marathon in 2009 created a master plan for outdoor learning on the 20+ acre property of Jackson-Via Elementary School. The master plan includes 10+ acres of woodland, edible gardens, habitat gardens, and spaces where children can learn and appreciate the natural world while meeting curriculum goals. An already completed mini-meadow installation consists primarily of butterfly host and nectar plants, using 99% native plant material. The mini-meadow will eventually be part of a larger "meadow walk." The group also plans to plant a child-size orchard of sour cherry and pawpaw trees.