Madeline Willett, the San Mateo County Office of Education’s Environmental Sustainability Fellow, presented environmental opportunities for students at the Leaders for Environmental Awareness and Protection, or LEAP, club meeting on March 28.
Invited by LEAP club president and junior Anna Zhang, Willett spoke about the Environmental Youth Leaders Summit on April 18, which was hosted by the San Mateo County and located at the College of San Mateo during their Earth Day activities.
“We are trying to form a network of all the green teams, people interested in environmental efforts or environmental issues across the high schools,” Willett said. “So they can share each other’s successes and failures and collaborate. We want them to actually design the network at the youth summit and really have this support system of all the high school students, all the schools. It would really help very close forward in the years, even after club leaders graduate.”
Along with the summit, Willett has announced SMCOE’s One Planet challenge that awards students with projects aligning with the one of the 10 categories of the One Planet Living framework, which involves a guideline for environmental sustainability and a healthy lifestyle.
“We want them to actually design the network at the youth summit and really have this support system of all the high school students, all the schools. It would really help very close forward in the years, even after club leaders graduate.”
“We wanted to say that we really value the work that these groups are doing and recognize people and give them awards for all the hard work that they’re doing,” said Environmental Literacy Coordinator Andra Yeghoian. “Part of what’s cool about One Planet Living is that it’s not just about environmental things that are typical or standard like energy and water and waste, but it also goes beyond that to thinking about how we can live healthy and happily, how we can really improve the culture of our community and the connection between people, and also how we can ensure a really thriving economy that is not stuck in a boom and bust cycle.”
Since LEAP is a new club this spring semester, the club has not hosted many events, but is currently working on their vision to improve a more environmentally-friendly and conscious attitude on campus.
“Every single week in LEAP club, we go on a different topic about the Earth and how it’s affecting the earth and everyone around them,” said junior and treasurer of LEAP club Samantha Wen. “That’s how we’re starting awareness in the club, but we also wanted to do a week [with leadership] about recycling just because that’s such a big part of the environment and not a lot of people do recycle. We want to have recycling events … It’s really interesting to learn about all these issues that are going on and how we can do these little tasks in our daily life to help out the earth.”
Similar to LEAP club, the San Mateo sustainability office is relatively new with a goal to spread awareness and involve the younger generation.
“San Mateo County actually has an office of sustainability, which is great, [because] not all counties have that. They have made tons of effort in the energy and water areas, as well as studying the sea level rise,” Willett said. “At the county office of education, the position that my supervisor Andra has, the environmental literacy coordinator, [is] the first division of its kind. By adopting that role and hiring for it and launching this initiative, this is the first of its kind really to be seen at a county level for schools. That’s really important and we will be able to see the effects of that in the future.”
“We run a teacher professional development program for the last three years that’s really popular and has helped over 150 teachers learn how to design really awesome, environmental sustainability units that they do with their students”
Yeghoian elaborates on the other projects San Mateo currently has, starting with the adults and continuing with students.
“We run a teacher professional development program for the last three years that’s really popular and has helped over 150 teachers learn how to design really awesome, environmental sustainability units that they do with their students,” Yeghoian said. “We run that program for a number of years and now this summer, we’re offering three or four more professional development programs in addition to that program. We’ve been working with different community providers. We’ve got them in a network, and we’re working towards making sure that every student in our county has access to those field trips.”
However, in the future, the San Mateo County plans to include the youth more.
“A really important thing that we’re trying to work on in the future is just getting more and more people to participate and more and more schools on board,” Yeghoian said. “We’d love to see in the next couple years every single school having an effort or every single school having somebody at their school who’s doing something that would be able to be recognized in our One Planet Schools challenge.”
Willet’s presentation allowed students to understand their individual impact and emphasized the importance of protecting the earth for future generations through increasing awareness and taking action.
