Green School Award

Green School Award Winners

The City of Ventura's Environmental Sustainability Division in partnership with Agromin Premium Soil Products and E.J. Harrison offers the Environmental Leader Award in recognition of Earth Day. In addition to City recognition there is a monetary award to help further fund sustainability projects at schools in the city. All public and private schools within the Ventura City limits that demonstrate exemplary efforts to help our environment are encouraged to apply.

Congratulations to the 2017-2018 Winner!

We are happy to announce that Balboa Middle School and Poinsetia Elementary School won our 2017-2018 Environmental Leadership Award.

Balboa Middle School’s Salad Bar Farms has been a beautiful example of how environmental projects have cascading positive effects. The mission of the farm is to create happy, healthy, and inclusive communities. Students lead garden markets on school grounds and grow food for the school’s salad bar. This year, Balboa worked with the City of Ventura to perform a waste audit and found that an estimated 12,000 pounds of food is thrown away every year just during lunch! With this award, Chris Massa and Balboa Middle School can purchase three Vermicompost bins for their garden in effort to collect wasted food from lunch, compost it, and use the worm castings on the school farm to add nutrients to the soil. This is a great example of how we, as a community, can close the food loop and prevent organic material from being landfilled. This project provides a learning opportunity for the horticulture students that work with Chris and has the potential to reduce several tons of landfill-bound waste every year.

Balboa Middle School is an environmental leader in many regards and we look forward to seeing their campus evolve even more as a hub for stewards of sustainability.

For our next award, we have Poinsettia Elementary School. Elizabeth Harris, alongside her school staff and parents, has been working hard to secure funding to create an outdoor learning center for their students to engage with native plants and have a space to learn in the outdoors. Students have shown great desire to have an area where they can explore the natural beauty of their campus. Poinsettia’s PTO has raised over $10,000 for this project, and this year they are getting a little extra help from the Green School Award. Students and their parents have worked together to design and raise money for this wonderful project. With the implementation of this outdoor learning space, students at Poinsettia will have an area to teach outdoor classes, grow food and native plants, and hold plays or other announcements in the natural amphitheater.

Poinsettia has always been engaged in environmental programs and we are all very excited to help them make this project a reality.