sustainable school Tag

Late last winter we conducted a professional development session with the Riverstone International School middle school teachers. We discussed ideas for how they could get support in their classrooms with sustainable objectives and projects, and created a dream list of sustainability projects and ideas for...

Last Thursday and Friday we broke the daily rainfall records in Boise, and on Friday as the rainfall turned to snow, we broke a 1969 snow record for daily snow in April with 2.1" of snowfall, according the to the National Weather Service...

Updated! The Boise River ReWild project is a community effort of partners working with Golden Eagle Audubon Society to restore over 40 acres of land in the Boise River corridor. In September of 2022 SustainingUS adopted a plot to help keep the project going and...

Winter is a great time to work on getting ready for the spring planting season. This February we designed a rewarding project for the Riverstone International School 9th grade Wednesday field experience. The school wanted to create community gardens along the back of the play...

October is a great time to plant perennial shrubs and trees. This project day started with lessons in: ecology, fire and windbreaks, succession, native plants and restoration. The Riverstone International School 9th graders are a great group of students who seemed to enjoy making campus...

This spring Lucky Peak Nursery, a USFS production nursery, overproduced native plants for their needs and had to sell the extras to the public! In early April I purchased 50 sage brush, 50 bitterbrush, and 100 ponderosa pine seedlings....

"We had a fabulous harvest and feast today!!! Everyone tried them and most came back for more! They said to tell their “mushroom teacher” that they were brave and ate the mushrooms!!! Thank you for an amazing experience." Mrs. Beltrami, Riverstone Pre-K teacher....

There are so many benefits to having living plants in indoor and especially in educational spaces. Indoor plants are important for mental health; they contribute to feelings of peace and solitude, and are inherently calming. Several years ago the Riverstone Green Team (Snake Plant Blog)...

One of the most striking changes for some of us is the total social disconnection we have created out of a desire to be safe and socially conscious citizens. For some introverts, I know this has been a time of reprieve- a great time to...

We are excited to have the ability to have green team meetings! Given how strange a year its been and health focused restrictions we are meeting outside once a week to work on projects wearing masks! One silver lining that our outdoor focus and outdoor...

To get our populace into the mindset of making big changes the Green Team and Sustainability Council came together to start planning our Earth Week last year. We decided a great way to introduce our plan and a good kick off would be a community...

I believe that there are two types of plants in the world which are worth having in all of our schools: 1) native plants to create and reinforce a "sense of place" and 2) edible plants to ensure this connection "to place" is meaningful and delicious! Over the course of the spring we had the opportunity to make changes to the Riverstone landscape to make it more edible for the wildlife and significantly increase the possibility of harvesting some berries on campus!