Patterson Park Public Charter School

Green School Application 2016-2017

The mission of Patterson Park Public Charter School is to provide a community-centered learning environment that values diversity and embraces a whole child approach to develop well-educated citizens.

Patterson Park Public Charter School is a public charter school located next to Patterson Park in the city of Baltimore. It started as an idea more than ten years ago, conceived of by a group of concerned people who wanted a school that would be an integral part of their community. The founders’ vision was to bring together the resources of the community, the park, and families to educate the whole child.

Three years later, in the former St. Elizabeth’s Catholic School building, we started the process of building our school.

Right from the start, our Board decided to do everything we could to encourage our students to be stewards of the community. One way to do this was to become energy-efficient and eco-friendly in our building. We replaced windows, changed flooring, used earth-friendly cleaning products and set up a small recycling program.

Another key element of stewardship at PPPCS is service learning. Our students and teachers devote two days a year to the community, one in the spring and one in the fall. On service learning days, each class of PPPCS performs a service learning project around the Patterson Park area. Most of the projects move the students out of the school building—into the park for clean ups and tree-planting or into the surrounding neighborhoods to give away flowers started in the classroom, label storm drains, or spread the word to neighbors about important community initiatives.

Now in our tenth year, our school continues to increase its commitment to being green. We extended recycling into every classroom in 2009, with the recycling bins picked up every day by our custodial staff and brought to the recycling center. We streamlined our recycling process in 2012 by switching to a recycling dumpster that gets picked up twice a week. This year, we have added recycling cans to every hallway on every floor of what is now a campus of three buildings. We have also brought in recycling cans to each and every classroom.

In 2011 our relationship with the Baltimore Energy Challenge commenced. They were able to bring the awareness of energy consumption to all of our students and staff by presenting at our professional developments, hosting assemblies, and working weekly with a group of concerned middle-school students that we labeled our ‘green team’. Working with the Baltimore Energy Challenge, the Green Team developed an energy audit, conducted it throughout the school, and made recommendations to our facilities manager for changes that would save energy and money at our school. The Green Team even wrote, acted, and filmed a movie about conserving energy to show the rest of the school as a kick-off for a three-month contest to see which classroom could save the most energy. Now our Green Team is comprised of fourth graders who meet on Wednesdays to discuss, plan and investigate all things that impact our school and community.

PPPCS is excited about the possibility of being recertified as a Green School of Maryland, we were originally certified four years ago. Our students are eager to continue the work of making our school greener. Our teachers, staff, and board of directors are committed to educating students about the environment and their role in being good stewards. This whole process has been an amazing experience for the entire PPPCS community and brought us even closer to meeting our goal but also to increasing the awareness to others around us.