School division building climate action plan

The Seven Oaks School Division is doing a comprehensive audit of its carbon footprint to create a plan to help staff and students do their part under the 2016 Paris Agreement and signal-boost eco-friendly projects.

“It can’t be a select few people caring for the Earth. It’s at the point where we need everybody on board and everybody has different gifts and that’s something we focus on with students,” said Heather Eckton, a teacher who oversees climate action projects in 28 schools in north Winnipeg.

Eckton has spent much of the school year brainstorming how to create a holistic and first-of-its-kind climate action plan in Manitoba.

Only five of 380 English-language school boards in Canada have released road maps to reduce their emissions, per a 2023 review conducted by researchers at Lakehead University in Thunder Bay, Ont.

Seven Oaks tapped Eckton for a divisional team lead position in September 2023. Before that, she taught high schoolers for 20 years — a period during which she said she witnessed teenagers’ growing anxiety about climate change.

Eckton’s involvement with Sustainable Living Academy Manitoba, a program offered at West Kildonan Collegiate, also showed her how giving young people an opportunity to engage in solutions is transformative for them, she said.

As far as she is concerned, schools should promote “hopeful action learning” that shifts student fear and helplessness to hope and collective responsibility.

Her school division’s new initiative builds on that belief, or what the career teacher calls “growing the good.”

Its climate action plan is being organized by a team of roughly 25 people, ranging from students to trustees, who want to align the division with climate scientist recommendations and an international treaty that Canada signed to reduce the average global temperature to less than 2 C above pre-industrial levels.

(Article 12 of the Paris Agreement requires signatories “enhance climate change education, training, public awareness, public participation and public access to information.”)

Eckton — who is a PhD student studying climate change education at the University of Manitoba — gathered the new Seven Oaks Climate Action Collaborative Learning Team in December for a full day of discussion about their participatory action research project.

The group’s goals? “Understand where we are, where we want to be, and how to get there,” she said.

Their work has begun with a baseline greenhouse gas inventory and the distribution of school surveys to get a sense of existing infrastructure challenges and environmental initiatives.

Seven Oaks is modelling its holistic plan after an 114-page road map that was published by Denver Public Schools in 2023 in response to student activism.

The Colorado district analyzed how many metric tonnes of CO2 equivalent it produces and broke down emissions — 84 per cent of which were linked to powering buildings in 2021 — by sector and source.

Its response plan includes long-term and five-year targets to tackle pollution and foster environmental stewardship through climate change education and professional development.

By 2028, the organization aims to reduce its energy and water consumption levels by 15 per cent and achieve a minimum 25 per cent landfill diversion rate. Officials also plan to buy electric yellow buses so at least 12 per cent of the fleet has “zero tailpipe emissions” by that deadline.

Other immediate priorities include rolling out sustainable school design requirements, incentivizing active commuting options, and making outdoor learning space accessible on every site.

Eckton said her Winnipeg team’s plan will be similarly all-encompassing and take into account everything from governance to land stewardship.

Every school in Seven Oaks has a dedicated climate action leader and half of them already have student-led environmental groups, she said, adding that community members currently participate in composting and land-based learning, among numerous activities.

Seven Oaks opened the Aki Centre in West St. Paul in 2019 to host medicine-picking, gardening workshops and restoration work to return the over-farmed plot to its tallgrass prairie and wetland origins.

Eckton said it’s a common misconception that science teachers alone should be responsible for talking about climate change in their classrooms.

“Too often, the conversation is focused on the negative impacts we’re having on the planet because we know and it’s clear, doom and gloom doesn’t work with kids,” she noted.

What does work is helping students reflect and understand their relationship with the planet by exposing them to the natural environment and supporting their ideas to take local action, the teacher said.

Her board’s 2025-26 budget sets aside $60,000 for professional learning around climate education and related school-based initiatives next year. Trustees in the division declared a climate emergency in 2019.

maggie.macintosh@freepress.mb.ca