St. Paul Academy and Summit School offers a multitude of science electives – one of them being Environmental Science. Upper School Science teacher Karissa Baker, who teaches the course, explains why she created the elective and how it has changed students’ perspectives on the environment.

Q: Why did you create the Environmental Science class? Why do you think it’s important for students to take it?

A: We created the Environmental Science class about five years ago and we found that as an area in our curriculum that was missing. It was something that we needed to have for students to have the opportunity, whether or not they choose to take it, to be more environmentally literate. It’s also a really good interdisciplinary class after students at that time had taken earth science, biology, and chemistry. They come in with a lot of background knowledge that they’re able to apply to current issues.

Q: Why are you passionate about environmental science and why did you decide to teach it?

A: I’ve always been passionate about environmental stuff ever since I was pretty young like elementary school. There were things that I had always wanted to do. I’m not really sure where that really came from. It might just be growing up in northern Minnesota. But [environmental science] was always an area of interest for me.

Q: Ever since the environmental science class was created, could you compare how it’s affected SPA students then vs. now?

A: It’s an elective, it’s one semester. There’s typically 16-18 students in it every year so that’s a small snippet of the overall student population. I would say though that I often hear from students during the semester: ‘how come we didn’t know about this before?’, ‘why is this the first time we’re hearing about these things?’. So I do think it engages them in a different way and makes them more aware of current issues and able to be more literate about those issues.

Q: So would you agree students’ attitudes towards the environment has changed since the class has been created?

A: It’s hard for me to say that because I haven’t done any polls or anything like that. And it’s also a self-selected group of students because it’s an elective so I think that for the most part students that take it, it’s an area of interest for them.

Q: How environmentally aware do you feel SPA is?

A: [SPA is] pretty environmentally aware. There’s a lot of things that we could do differently, just simple things like recycling, and composting in the building. I think people can be careless about that stuff and put stuff in the wrong container which can completely contaminate an entire batch of compost. There’s been a few students that have really tried to push some things and they consistently go back and [talk to people about individually packaged foods, for example]. There are some individual students that really take things to the next level. I think it’s just a matter of awareness and education to a large part.

Q: What doesn’t SPA do that you think we should do to be more environmentally friendly?

A: We’ve done more things in the last several years, for example composting in the lunchroom and having a little bit more education around recycling and that kind of stuff in the building. I think that a lot of our limitations come from the actual age of a lot of the buildings. You can make the biggest impact with a sustainable building in terms of energy use and that kind of thing. And so when you have old buildings, you’re limited in that and how well insulated they are and how well they use energy from the sun for lighting purposes. So every time you build something new, you have an opportunity to make a bigger impact and every time there is any rehab done on an old building, you have an opportunity to change it.

Q: Have there been any projects where students have taken initiative and been more environmentally friendly?

A: Some of the really active members of the PEP group, like [senior] Ora Hammel and Ellen McCarthy [who graduated last year], have individually taken things on. It’s [just] a matter of education. I talked to them a little bit about the education piece like making a little movie about recycling or about composting so that people are more aware. [People] just need to open their eyes and be more aware of what they’re doing and what they’re consuming in terms of resources and what they’re doing with it. That whole reduce, reuse, recycle. The best thing to do is reduce so don’t use as much. You really need to think about: ‘is there something else I could be using?’ Recycling’s great but recycling should be a second or third choice after reducing or reusing.

Some tips:

15 Easy Ways to Become Environmentally Friendly

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Can you pass this environmental science quiz?