Formerly a cocoa factory, the 55,000-square-foot structure was renovated according to sustainable principles, reusing an existing building and keeping the growing school in the neighborhood where its students live.

Head of School Miguel Brito led the challenge to develop a green school in an urban setting and extended the meaning of sustainability to include not just the school's students, teachers, staff and facilities, but also its wider community.

"I think the neighborhood was looking for an anchor," he says.

"We have definitely had an impact on our neighborhood," says Emily Marchese, development associate. "There are about 30 new houses which have gone up since we began our construction in 2006."

St. Philip's quite literally offers a shining example of the movement of Episcopal schools toward environmental responsibility:

It boasts a beacon of light that goes on at dusk and is seen throughout the neighborhood. Architects on the project dubbed it the Beacon of Optimism, Hope and Opportunity.

"It's just a thin line of low-wattage light, which goes on when it gets dark," Brito says, "but it is large and very visible. We have to be the sort of beacon that stands for best practices in our neighborhood and shares our resources in our community."

Schools have an incredible potential to affect the community in urban areas if they decide to open their doors, says Brito, head of the day school since 2000.

"Our Episcopal identity -- that everyone is welcome at the table -- if you start with that attitude, you'll be surprised at what you can do."

Students appreciate the gym and the rooftop garden most, Marchese says. "We now have a home court for basketball games and safe, green playing and working spaces here in the city."

The gymnasium structure and its roof with two feet of soil atop it were added to the renovated building. The rooftop provides areas for science experiments and gardening.

Inspiration for this came from looking at children's lives in the city. "We realized that we were giving kids a good academic education but not preparing them for the challenges that this planet faces," says Brito, who grew up "in the country with my hands in the dirt."

A growing trend
Building projects and issues often lead schools into looking systemically at sustainability, says the Rev. Daniel Heischman, executive director of the National Association of Episcopal Schools. The association uncovered this trend in a recent survey of Episcopal schools.

While some schools are just beginning to address sustainability in some aspect of school life, others are making progress in coordinating sustainability in facilities, curriculum and chapel.

Some schools have adopted sustainability as a core value in their mission statements. "There is often a realization that we as an Episcopal school have a niche in this area," notes Heischman.

On the other side of the continent from Newark, seven miles southwest of downtown Portland, Oregon -- which Popular Science dubbed the greenest city in America -- Jon von Behren is acting on his commitment to sustainability. Last year, Behren, director of facilities management at Oregon Episcopal School (OES), invited interested students, faculty, staff, parents and board members to meet to coordinate efforts at the prekindergarden-through-grade-12 day and boarding school.

"We made a list of the things we dream about," he says, "and then divided into five task forces: school operations, transportation, energy use, construction and 'ecoscaping.' The green building committee really took off and has been drafting a sustainability charter."

In the meantime, all the lighting was changed in the athletic facility, increasing energy efficiency and saving about $500 per month. Paper use was reduced throughout the school, and the green roof on the new middle school addition is used in student science research.

Von Behren was inspired to further his work in sustainability through attending a National Association of Independent Schools (NAIS) conference three years ago. He and middle school science teacher Joan Grimm, though, are quick to point out that students have been at the heart of things. This year, three seventh-graders, whose science and humanities studies emphasize environmental concern and action, took the lead in completing the application for OES to be named an Oregon Green School.

Responding to circumstances
For some schools moving toward sustainability, such as his, "change is incremental, and we celebrate small victories," von Behren says. For others, like St. Paul's Episcopal School in the Lakeview neighborhood of New Orleans, change is not a choice, but a response to overwhelming circumstance.

When Hurricane Katrina caused a levee along the 17th Street canal to burst, St. Paul's and its neighborhood were devastated. The school reopened as quickly as it could, but people returned slowly. So when Merry Sorrells began her work as the new head of school in June 2007, she knew desperate measures were required if the school were to survive and thrive.

"When I attended an institute for new heads in Washington, D.C.," she says, "I was inspired by the middle school facility at Sidwell Friends School, a LEED-certified [Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design] living building complete with a simulated wetland providing water filtration."

"I'd been hearing all kinds of opinions about New Orleans," she says, "including how we should just abandon the city. But I was convinced that we should build on the strength of our science curriculum and create an environmentally sustainable campus that could serve our students and also become a teaching institute for public and private schools throughout the community. I thought, 'Let's make our kids the ones that save our city.'"

Sorrells and two colleagues attended an architectural conference in Seattle, where they so impressed the conferees that they immediately were invited to a two-day charrette, or collaborative design conference. St. Paul's was the first private school included in the Great Schools by Design program, a national initiative of the American Architectural Foundation.

Among the "lessons learned" from the collaborative design process, as reported by Architectural Record, is that "a shift in purpose from simply restoring school buildings as quickly as possible to helping to restore the community is a holistic solution beneficial to all."

Sorrells notes, "Our teachers have embraced the idea of incorporating environmental education into a curriculum that can be taught all over New Orleans."

St. Paul's science teachers from every grade level are meeting before school, aware that they are well-positioned for this initiative with an outdoor classroom in the works and City Park nearby. A recovery group from the church is partnering with the children in developing a community garden on a vacant lot, and the school is seeking to build relationships with other nearby schools to see if together they can develop an arts center or media center in Lakeview, a neighborhood still lacking many basic services such as a post office and a library. St. Paul's Church, city council members and nearby universities are supportive of the work.

"It's such a community effort, and it keeps growing and growing," says Sorrells.

Still to come
A first sign of things to come on the St. Paul's campus is the installation of the Green Top Cottage, a gift of parents Vanessa and Michael Burst. The durable and efficient twin playhouse features roofs planted with native materials.

Every grade level at St. Paul's has picked an identity associated with environmental education. The fourth-graders, for example, are Weather Watchers.

The middle-schoolers have been participating in the NAIS Challenge 20-20. "We are teamed up with a school in Pakistan and one in Maine to solve the problem of global warming, one of 20 challenges, in the next 20 years," Sorrells says.

Next year, the school will have a new curriculum, with environmental education integrated with reading, math and other subjects.

"Examining the direction of our schools' ethical compass and pointing it squarely toward sustainability and an expanded world view is critical to securing our children's future," wrote Sorrells in a letter to the St. Paul's School community.

"Teaching our children to think critically, ethically, globally and with an eye toward future sustainability is not a passing educational fad."

Integrating students' physical environment, curriculum and an ethic of sustainability is a work in progress not just at St. Paul's, but also at other Episcopal schools.

St. Philip's Academy plans to install flat-panel monitors that show energy consumption, use the building to do math and geometry problems and grow plants of the local First Nations in the rooftop garden.

At OES, the campus and its buildings, especially the green roof and the 20 acres of wetlands, are filled with possibilities for the research-based science curriculum.

Episcopal schools are uniquely positioned to approach environmental education holistically, Heischman says, because "we have the opportunity to link sustainability with a spiritual world view and teach the moral and spiritual dimensions along with the science."

When St. Stephen's Cathedral and School in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, joined to convert a four-story garage into a green classroom building, the Rev. Kate Harrigan, chaplain, began using a curriculum from Interfaith Power and Light, which works to engage the faithful into environmental activism, with middleschoolers.

Out of this, she developed a sixth-grade course on religion and the environment, integrating biblical and scientific understandings and addressing global issues such as the U.N. Millennium Development Goals.

"My greatest joy," says Harrigan, "is being able to watch the students discover God's world, not just learn about it in a classroom" when she accompanies the fifth- and sixth-graders on their annual three-day, two-night environmental-education field trip. Students from both urban and suburban neighborhoods experience nature directly, including chapel services near a woodland stream.

"I also understand part of my role as chaplain to be keeping the community aware of our responsibility, not just from a social or scientific point of view, but from a faith perspective," she says.

Involving everyone
Just as sustainability efforts in schools require looking at the physical, intellectual and spiritual aspects of the school, they thrive when the whole school community is involved.

When Campbell Hall in North Hollywood, California, invited ZERI (Zero Emissions Research and Initiatives) founder Gunter Pauli to its campus last fall, staff made sure students, faculty, parents and friends of the school had opportunities to engage with his vision of seeing waste as a resource and nature as a source of design ideas.

In recent months, high school students collected 70 pounds of trash in three hours at Zuma Beach, third-grade boys repaired more than 40 bicycles and scooters that might otherwise have been thrown out, and a school Scout troop sponsored an "e-cycle" day, handling "anything with a cord."

Campbell Hall will participate in Big Sunday, an annual Los Angeles-wide community service event now in its 10th year, on May 4. Working with the Studio City Residents Association and the Studio City Beautification Association, the school community is putting together a project to share its commitment to vibrant sustainability with its surrounding neighborhood.