Advancing Education for Sustainable Development: Designing a Pilot Program for the Park Slope Education Complex, NYC Department of Education

The New York City Department of Education is the largest public education system in the world. It is responsible for the education and safety of 1.2 million children in approximately 1,600 public schools throughout the five boroughs. As a municipal government agency, the department is part of the efforts of New York City to engage in environmentally sustainable practice through PlaNYC. It has taken a two-pronged approach to fulfilling its PlaNYC goals. The first approach is to improve energy use and conservation in school buildings to decrease their carbon footprint, as well as to enhance recycling efforts. The second is to encourage curricular innovation at the individual school level to increase the understanding of and skills and knowledge acquisition in sustainability. A handful of “pioneering” schools have been addressing the issues of sustainable development through their core curriculum with the intended outcome of anchoring this education at the secondary level.

The Park Slope Education Complex, one of the largest middle school education campuses in New York City, is one of the “pioneering” schools. The school’s principal, Ailene Altman-Mitchell, has asked the workshop team to design and describe a pilot program that captures the essential elements of sustainable education. Core to the design of the pilot will be an evaluation framework that would support the translation of the pilot to a model, adaptable across other middle schools in the city and nation.