Setting The "Green Standard"

Throughout its 25-year history Charlottesville Waldorf School has educated students to be good stewards of the earth.  This attitude of stewardship derives from both the Waldorf curriculum used worldwide and from the particular culture of this Waldorf school: its faculty and parents.
In 2003, a group of these parents and faculty came together to form the Charlottesville Waldorf Foundation (CWF).  The CWF was established with the goal of not only building a new Charlottesville Waldorf School but, but taking its history of environmental responsibility to new levels by building "The Greenest School in America."  The Foundation is in the midst of a $6.7 million campaign that is designed to make "The Greenest School in America" a shining example of how schools, corporations and individuals can celebrate the environment while protecting it for generations to come.

The Waldorf curriculum, developed in Germany in 1919, is remarkably prescient in its understanding of the need to conserve our resources and preserve our beautiful earth.  Without teaching ecology as a formal subject before high school, the curriculum nonetheless embodies ecological awareness through a subtler means. The Waldorf science curriculum, for example, is phenomenologically based, and trains students in close observation of the environment: plants in their native or garden habitat, animals within their ecological systems, humans in all their extraordinary adaptabilty . The Waldorf methodology also gives students direct experiences of the physical and dynamic properties of nature.

In addition to what is already present in the national Waldorf curriculum, our particular Waldorf school (CWS) has had a green culture throughout its history.  CWS students and faculty have been actively recycling for decades; office and classroom paper, bottles and cans, even food scraps and plant trimmings are collected by all. The school also has an active composting program.  

All of these activities are integrated into the Charlottesville Waldorf School curriculum, which provides students at all grade levels with opportunities to appreciate and serve.  Each year, for example, while our third graders study our relationship to the earth and all its creatures, they are in charge of composting for the whole school. While they study farming and house building, they are also growing their own organic garden and spend a week at a biodynamic farm in New York state. Every Waldorf student participates in gardening and community clean-up activities, and our 8th graders mark the close of their Waldorf experience with an unforgettable eco-adventure that has taken them to destinations including Costa Rica, the North Carolina coast, northern Florida and the green mountains of Vermont.

Charlottesville Waldorf School has been widely recognized for its environmental stewardship. The Business Resource Recovery Alliance has awarded us several citations for our dedicated recycling efforts and we have recently we received an Environmental Compliance Citation for the safe disposal of lab chemicals used in our science classes.

In keeping with the Waldorf philosophy, our interest in protecting our resources extends far beyond our immediate surroundings. The school community is continually mindful of conservation on a global scale as well, earning a citation from The Nature Conservancy for our "remarkable contribution" in raising money to adopt 108 acres of rainforest in the Darien Biosphere Reserve in Panama.

The students of the Charlottesville Waldorf School do not just learn how to take care of the earth, they live their commitment each and every day. From collecting food scraps for use in a compost pile to maintaining a steadfast commitment to recycling in their classrooms and beyond to turning their focus on protecting ecosystems on the other side of the world, these students are on a path to become lifelong friends of the earth.

So when it came time to build a permanent home to house these and the next generation of Waldorf students, it was clear that only the most ecologically sound, green building would do. With the help of the Charlottesville Waldorf Foundation, this vision of the "Greenest School in America" is well on its way to reality.

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