Global Green USA announces Partnership with ECHS

Global Green USA is pleased to partner with the Environmental Charter High School (ECHS) to help share the best green practices, curriculum, and student and teacher engagement strategies developed by ECHS over the last 10 years, with schools throughout California, in New Orleans and across the country. 

ECHS is successfully demonstrating that providing environmental education for students to learn about their world and the ways they can live more sustainably - using ECHS’s own green facility as a living, learning laboratory – garners extraordinary results and helps students to prepare for the  green economy of the future.  Global Green is excited to support ECHS's green school ambassador program and plans to learn from their work as we build and expand our National Green Schools Initiative to encourage and inspire students, parents and teachers.

Since 2002, Global Green has been a pioneer in greening nearly $17 billion in new green school construction in Los Angeles (the largest school building program in the country).  Thanks to a unique partnership funded by the Annenberg Foundation, Global Green has provided education, policy recommendations, and technical assistance to the Los Angeles Unified School District to insure that more than 62 New schools will be healthy, high performance green schools for tens of thousands of students.

Global Green is also helping green new and existing schools in San Francisco and New Orleans with the support of the San Francisco Foundation, the Doug and Lisa Goldman Foundation, and the Bush Clinton Katrina Fund. 

As a direct result of Global Green’s National Green Schools Initiative, 20,000 students who were in overcrowded and rundown schools across the U.S. now attend classes in healthy classrooms in state-of-the-art green schools.  Soon, that number will triple.  Now, Global Green is expanding its initiative with the goal of insuring that within a generation all students can learn in a healthy, high performance classroom.

Green School benefits include: significantly reduce operating expenses, important given sash-strapped schools spend more money on electricity than on books and computers; increase student performance by up to 18 to 22 percent thanks to improved day lighting; reduce CO2 emissions and water usage; improve student and teacher health and result in fewer sick days, higher teacher retention, and improved student attendance. 

Global Green USA, the only national environmental organization headquartered in Southern California, is the American arm of President Mikhail Gorbachev’s Green Cross International. Global Green USA’s mission is to foster a global value shift toward a more sustainable and secure future by reconnecting humanity to the environment.
www.globalgreen.org