Sustainability and Environmental Stewardship

This group of faculty and staff has been summarizing and evaluating the efforts by OES in three key areas in order to create a set of recommendations for the Strategic Planning Committee. Their goal is to complete these recommendations by the end of the 23-24 school year. The areas of focus are:

• Facilities & Infrastructure: How much energy do we use? Is it gas or electric? How much comes from the solar panels we will install? Are new buildings LEED certified, or designed in a way that minimizes energy and water use? How do we lower our carbon footprint?
• Natural Resources: How can OES sustainably manage its forests, wetlands, and gardens to promote ecological longevity, while enriching the student learning experience?
• Social Connections: How do we educate and motivate the OES community around sustainability?

The Vark Tank

Seventh grade students are challenged to make an invention or innovation that will help humans adapt to or mitigate the effects of climate change on our planet.

Fourth Grade Advocacy Unit

Students learn about advocating for marginalized communities and the environment. Last year, a group of students made an appeal before the Portland City Council to ask them to support the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals in our region, specifically related to plastics production and plastics recycling.

Upper School Curriculum

The Advanced Molecular Biology course aims to equip students with advanced molecular biology skills and inspire their exploration of biotechnology's potential in addressing real-world challenges. "Exploring Biogeochemistry: From Field to Lab" focuses on the cycles of elements such as nitrogen, carbon, phosphorus, and sulfur and the role they play in agriculture and food production, fisheries and aquaculture, atmospheric deposition, and climate change. "Global Systems: Population Growth, Pollution, and Health" explores the interconnected nature of global systems, with a particular emphasis on environmental toxicology, pollution and embryology, and human population change. 

Upper School Greenhouse Courses

"Energy Systems Engineering: Food of the Future" (Semester 1) and "Process Design & Engineering: Building an OES Aquaponics System" (Semester 2) launching in 2024-25. These new courses will explore the intersection of technology, agriculture, and sustainability, addressing the crucial need for innovative agricultural solutions amid population growth and climate change.

OES works regularly with the Energy Trust of Oregon to help identify strategies for energy savings throughout the campus.

Lower School Building

Strategic solar orientation, natural daylighting, and natural ventilation. The building is intentionally oriented on an east/west axis to optimize daylight. A stack ventilation system communicates via sensors with the user-operable windows and mechanical system. Rainwater is captured on the roof and routed to interactive features for children to engage. Natural materials and finishes are used throughout the building, inside and out. We partnered with the Energy Trust of Oregon Path to Net Zero with a highly efficient building envelope, passive cooling strategies and limited mechanical cooling—a design that embraces nature and the outdoors as a teaching tool.

Middle School Building

A portion of the Middle School roof is constructed with a green roof installation while the majority of the roof will support a solar array installation to integrate more sustainable energy usage in the building.

Athletic Center

As part of the building design, we made the entire building solar ready, and ensured that it uses the same passive cooling, highly efficient building envelope passive cooling system.

Drinkward Center for Math, Science, and Technology

During design and construction, OES participated in Portland General Electric’s Earth Advantage program that prioritized energy efficiency and the selection of locally sourced, rapidly renewable, and low-VOC construction materials.

Energy Efficiency

OES has been enrolled for several years in the Energy Trust of Oregon’s Strategic Energy Management program, working with ETO advisors every month to identify new energy savings goals and strategies.

Water Filtration

Most of the storm water runoff from campus is cleaned in one of three filtration vaults before it is discharged into Fanno Creek.

The EC3 Design Center plays a key role in sustainability education at OES. The design center is a place where students from all grade levels conceive and test their ideas, while creatively using mindfully sourced, sustainable, and recycled materials.

Students come to the EC3 Design Center to create prototypes for projects such as Animal Adaptations (second grade), the Vark Tank (seventh grade), and the Aardvark Science Expo (grades 9-12). They source their materials in EC3’s Stuff and Things section, a treasure trove of donated items ranging from cardboard boxes, to toy parts, to scraps of fabric. These items may be used again after prototypes are deconstructed.

Students also make structures like bird houses and bee boxes in the design center, as well as sets and props for the theater program, using recycled materials wherever possible.

By teaching sustainability concepts from an early age, in a way that is inspiring to students, the EC3 Design Center program lays a foundation for lifelong mindfulness about sustainability and the environment.

Students care for the campus by pulling non-native English ivy from the trees in the woods and growing vegetables in Fariss Garden that are given to neighborhood organizations who assist people experiencing food insecurity. Primary students regularly pick up trash on campus during their morning walks. Third graders pair their studies of indigenous lifeways with clearing ivy from the woods, with the long-term goal of restoring balance and reintroducing more native plants. Sixth graders focus on the eco-justice pillar, "the well being of all humankind on a thriving earth." They restore the woods and wetlands and in the spring move to the Fariss Community Garden to help plant and tend to vegetables.

Upper School Activity: Woods 101

In this activity, Upper School students worked to better understand physical characteristics of the OES Woods.  Students researched how to use equipment commonly employed in forest management such as a clinometer (for height) and how to estimate carbon sequestration in trees.  Students took measurements of tree circumference, height, and attempted to identify various tree species.  The students measured over 100 trees and have identified 78 trees, most of which are Douglas Firs, that are over 60 inches in diameter.  Many of these trees are over 100 feet tall and students calculated that they have sequestered over 215 tons of carbon.  

Working with Chinook Tribal Artist Mark D. Shelton

Honorary Chinook Tribal Artist Mark D. Shelton annually shares Chinook tribal history with Lower School art classes. His intensely colorful collages, made from acrylic paint and exotic paper, portray images from Native American life. Shelton’s inspiration comes from the classic photography of Edward S. Curtis, who photographed indigenous peoples all over the United States in the early 1900s.

Visits from Stephanie Craig

An enrolled member of The Confederated Tribes of Grand Ronde Community of Oregon, Craig is a seventh-generation traditional basket weaver, tradition keeper, and ethnobotanist. She regularly visits Lower and Middle Schools to teach students about indigenous culture and share her deep knowledge of basket-weaving and its significance in Native American life. In her work with 3rd grade students, she focuses on native plant education, Indigenous lifeways, and stewardship. She also shares her knowledge about how plants are harvested, their uses, and their cultural significance to the tribes.

This past fall, a group of Upper School students helped researchers from the Tualatin Soil & Water Conservation District collect data about turtles in the OES pond. The district monitors native (such as Western painted) and non-native (snapping or red-eared) turtle species. The students helped the researchers capture, weigh, measure, and notch the turtles (to track growth). The non-native turtles were removed to protect the native species that live in the pond. “Our students were fascinated watching the researchers during their turtle trapping and data collection process,” said Upper School Science Teacher Joshua Caditz. “Beyond building a long-term data set to build a comprehensive understanding of the turtle populations in the area, it's about conservation and ensuring the survival of our native species in the face of challenges posed by invasive species.”

Upper School SOIL (Science Outreach for Inquiry and Learning)

In the Upper School SOIL (Science Outreach for Inquiry and Learning) activity, students create hands-on science lessons and then travel to a local elementary school to teach the lessons to 4th and 5th graders. Students generated units on topics such as wind turbine efficiency and food insecurity.

A key resource for education, in the greenhouse students can learn about caring for plants and family members can join them for activities such as creating compostable flower arrangements from materials found on campus.

“The greenhouse is the visible link between our stated commitments and our lived action. Through curriculum and other programs that support environmental sustainability, the facility is a hub through which our environmental stewardship is supported and activated to promote deeper student learning, and an ally to help students realize their power for good in this critical moment of existential challenge around an issue that deeply impacts them and will impact our shared future." The Rev. Michael Spencer, Head of School.

Upper School Greenhouse Community Engagement

Greenhouse students regularly engage with our community partners for events, gatherings, and service around the Portland area.

Community Building Events

Throughout the year, open events invite members of the community to use the greenhouse space for education, creative design, and education regarding the local flora and fauna of the OES campus.

Several of the 2024 projects focused on issues related to the environment. Here are just a few examples:

Jiaming Z. '25 won the 2024 Stockholm Junior Water Prize for the state of Oregon for his project and corresponding research paper: EcoProbe: A Novel Machine Learning Model for Predicting Water Chemical Values with Satellite Imagery and Convolutional Neural Network (CNN) through Advanced MultiRegression Modeling of Wetland Ecosystem Health. The study introduces EcoProbe, a method for assessing wetland health using remote sensing techniques to predict twenty water chemical values. EcoProbe combines data from 50 wetland water samples with satellite imagery and machine learning models, such as Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN), to correlate water chemistry with environmental indices. By achieving high predictive accuracy and validation of wetland species occurrence, EcoProbe offers a proactive tool for early detection of nutrient insufficiency and contamination, streamlining wetland ecosystem monitoring without frequent in-person testing.

Lily T. ’24 won NOAA’s Taking the Pulse of the Planet Award, as well as first place in Environmental and Earth Sciences at ASE for her work on harmful algal blooms off the Oregon coast.

Athena H.C. ’24 won the Class of 2018 Environmental Research Award, as well as first place in Biochemistry. She will be attending ISEF for her work on the “Depolymerization of PET fibers using a bacterial consortium and UV pretreatment” in partnership with Reed College. 

Riley S. ’26 conducted research last spring on “The effects of wavelength and temperature on the voltage output of solar panels.” Her work was recognized for an award from the United States Environmental Protection Agency, as well as getting second place in the Physics and Astronomy category at ASE. 

OES Solve is a branch of the Upper School community engagement activity that focuses on improving the environment in our local and broader community. “Through active participation by OES students in litter and trail cleanup, or our collaboration with the Lower School to pull ivy, for example, we strive to improve our planet!” said Edward B. ’24.

The Environmental Club focuses on educating the OES community about environmental issues and motivating them to help advance change. Club leader Athena H.C. ’24 leads students in activism efforts such as participating in the annual Portland Youth Climate Strike (PYCS) held in downtown Portland. “PYCS is a citywide, multigenerational mobilization calling on Portland (and Oregon) to enact radical change to stop the climate crisis,” said Athena.

This series, coordinated by Upper School Science Teacher Peter Jewett, engages scientists and engineers who speak to the students about innovative, future-facing work that addresses the challenges of climate change and sustainability, as well as potential career pathways in science and engineering. Speakers to date include:

• Sarah Hile, a marine ecologist with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration
• Wade Flanagan, an engineering director at Nike
• Lucas Black, vice president for Climate Finance at the World Wildlife Fund
• Nicole Ruggiero, rural conservation program manager for Tualatin Soil and Water Conservation District
• Johan Kers, co-founder and CEO of Birch Biosciences
• Eve-Lyn Hinckley, biogeochemist at the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at University of Colorado, Boulder

Our vendor Bon Appétit is committed to serving food that is sustainably raised and locally sourced. The company composts their food scraps and is working with students on ways they can reduce food waste.

Bon Appétit’s Approach to Sustainability

Wellness and sustainability are intertwined at Bon Appétit with an approach to cooking that emphasizes an abundance of fresh fruits and vegetables, whole grains, and healthy fats—all foods that nourish our students and have a more modest carbon footprint than menus heavy on meat, dairy, and processed foods. 

Bon Appétit’s mission is to supply the dining hall with high-quality ingredients from farms within 150 miles of our campus. It’s not only important to purchase as much locally-produced food as possible, but to consider how land is stewarded, how workers are treated, what animal welfare practices are in place, and how far and by what means food has been shipped. 

Once food enters the kitchen, dining hall staff focuses on sustainably managing what’s been purchased. The managers and chefs work to minimize waste to the greatest extent possible, starting with from-scratch cooking using stem-to-root and nose-to-tail cooking techniques.

Information courtesy of Bon Appétit’s website.

The School’s mission is to educate students to realize their power for good as engaged citizens of the world. As part of achieving this mission, the School acknowledges the importance of protecting or enhancing the environment. This value will be considered as a main component of the investment strategy decision-making process.