Green in Action Winner
Ivy Academy
Soddy Daisy, TN
Live Green Project and National Green Week
The Live Green project in March, 2014 was created so that our school (Ivy Academy Chattanooga) could raise awareness for energy conservation in the community as well as in our students.
I came up with this project after my teacher, Mrs. Holly Slater and I looked at our energy bill last year and saw that March was our month of highest energy consumption. We decided that there was definitely a way to reduce this amount of energy used while teaching people how to save energy in their own homes.
So I came up with ideas along with my leadership class to reduce the amount of energy used while educating the students of our school and the community. We came up with an energy saving tip for every day in March and we had teachers read them in homeroom every morning as well as putting them up on a Tip of the Day board. I set up an energy booth in our school’s cafeteria so that every student and teacher in the school would have a chance to visit it. The booth had the Tip of the Day board, a board with information on my project, many different tools to save energy in your own home, information on how to receive them for free, and papers showing different forms of energy and how environmentally clean they are. Some of our tools were faucet aerators which consume less water, outlet insulators which insulate buildings better and energy efficient light bulbs with information explaining the benefits of using them over traditional light bulbs. We posted the Tip of the Day on our Ivy Academy Chattanooga Facebook page every day and reached out to many members of our community.
Another tool that we implemented during the Live Green month was to hang up tips and facts all over the school about waste, water, power, and other factors of energy consumption all over the school. We encouraged students to turn off the water while lathering their hands with soap and to turn out the lights when they’re not in a room.
Another part of my Live Green month project was to plan out an Eco-Green Week during the month of March. During this week we had a different theme every day and we had many guest speakers come and talk to students about different forms of conservation and why they’re important.
- Monday was our water conservation day where students could participate by wearing shirts with water, aquatic life, and other water related shirts as well as attending an assembly with a guest speaker from TVA.
- Tuesday was our waste reduction day where students could participate by wearing re-used clothes (hand me downs, thrift store items, etc.) while still dressing appropriately as well as attending assemblies with both Orange Grove Recycling Plant employees and our compost specialist.
- Wednesday was our blackout day where students could participate by wearing all black and attend school when we used no power. That day we had sack lunches, had more classes outside, and tried to use as little power as possible.
- Thursday was our local market day where we encouraged students to participate by dressing like a farmer and attending our on campus local market which explained the importance of purchasing local goods. We had many parents and family members of students as well as teachers and students attend this local market. The community got to see local animals as well as produce that have been raised or grown in Chattanooga.
At the end of my project, we surveyed many of the students in the school about how much they learned and if they enjoyed the Live Green month. Nine out of ten students said that they enjoyed the Live Green month, learned, and would do it again, which is a great turnout in my opinion because of how much our generation seems to not care about our environment and energy conservation.
I’m glad that I’ve taken part in helping our generation and community learn more about energy conservation and to give them a passion for learning more about reducing waste, energy consumption, and water consumption.