First Person: How the pandemic helped one school embrace its green identity

Abstract

Eastwood Elementary School is a LEED Gold Certified facility and a National Green Ribbons Schools winner in suburban Morgantown, West Virginia. Over the course of the school’s eight-year existence, the faculty has worked to become green not only in name and in terms of its facility, but also in its instructional practice. The school made many efforts to reach this goal, yet the staff worried that fully embracing environmental education would take too much time away from core content. Teacher Jennifer Potts describes how the need for social distancing and increased ventilation during the COVID-19 pandemic led the staff to spend more time outdoors and see opportunities to more fully integrate environmental education and outdoor learning into regular lessons.