Volume Eleven, Issue 6- March 2007
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| Catherine Salvin (in red) directs students like Kevin Quan (in white) in ways to help maintain a wildlife refuge at Heron’s Head Park in San Francisco. |
Downtown Continuation High School students live in some of the roughest neighborhoods in San Francisco and are not easily shocked. But when they learn about the abundance of toxins within their own community, the teens are outraged and motivated to make things better.
The school’s environmental education program, called the Wilderness Arts and Literacy Collaborative (WALC), uses different environmental themes to integrate curriculum across all subjects. Team teachers Catherine Salvin and Sherry Bass — both members of United Educators of San Francisco (UESF) — chose “environmental justice” as one of the themes around which to center core curriculum last fall. The unit — “Struggling for Sustainability: Preservation, Restoration and Environmental Justice” — sparked student interest in environmental problems facing their community.
As the semester progressed, students quickly figured out that environmental injustice was rampant in their own backyard. In fact, they decided it could be considered a form of “environmental racism.”
Teachers Salvin and Bass teamed up with Literacy for Environmental Justice (LEJ), a nonprofit agency based in the low-income community of Hunters Point, where many of their students also live. One of their field trips with the agency was the “Toxic Tour” of the Bay View/Hunters Point area, which has 325 toxic sites. Students learned that the neighborhood’s residents, who are mostly low-income people of color, comprise 5 percent of the city’s population but live with a third of the city’s industry and 30 percent of its hazardous waste sites. The worst polluters are a sewage plant, a defunct naval shipyard and a recently closed power plant.
Students learned that toxins may be one of the reasons Hunters Point residents suffer from many diseases — including congestive heart failure, asthma, breast cancer and cervical cancer — at much higher rates than those who live in more affluent San Francisco neighborhoods.
“I don’t think it’s right that there is so much pollution here,” says Victoria Nastor, 16. “In a white neighborhood, you wouldn’t find that happening because they have more money. But they think it’s okay to do this where people of color live.”
“The students had no idea that the pollution was so severe,” says Salvin. “These kids are confronted every day by poverty, violence and unemployment. A lot of the time, environmental issues take a back seat. But once the evidence of environmental injustice was pointed out, many students became angry. They think that it’s very unfair. They wanted to know what they could do about it.“
“That’s exactly what we want them to ask,” adds Salvin. “Facilitating activism is part of what WALC’s project-based curriculum is designed to do.”
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| With a retired power plant looming in the distance, Ashley Murray (left) and Veronica Courtade (right) help to maintain a wildlife refuge at Heron’s Head Park in San Francisco. |
Students took on the task of publishing a newsletter designed to educate the school community about the environmental issue of their choice. One group chose toxins in San Francisco, while others chose such issues as global warming, composting and logging. Along with their newsletter, each group made posters and gave oral presentations to every other class in the school.
Students also rolled up their sleeves and went to work in wildlife areas. “WALC students are no strangers to habitat restoration,” says Salvin. “They volunteer regularly at McLaren Park and Bayview Hill, two of San Francisco’s natural areas that are bordered by the diverse, low-income communities where many students live.”
Students also teamed up with LEJ to volunteer at Heron’s Head Park on a rainy Wednesday in December to help improve the habitat for wildlife. They planted native plant species, weeded out non-native plants, and cleaned areas of the park. Heron’s Head Park is a 24-acre restored wetland near a closed power plant and a recycling center. Thanks to volunteerism, it has become a thriving marsh that supports more than 78 species of birds annually as well as some animals on the verge of extinction, like the salt marsh harvest mouse.
While at Heron’s Head, students gathered pieces of wood and sometimes even logs to create “brush piles” that animals could live in. Even though they were wearing gloves, the students screamed when they would encounter a mouse, lizard or salamander under something they had picked up. But soon they’d toughen up and get back to work.
“These kids are tough. But they feel good about what they do here because it’s their community,” says Bass, who facilitates student environmental art projects, such as creating posters, paintings and tile mosaics.
“It’s a way to give back,” says Veronica Courtade, 17. “We have a bad problem here that will otherwise just get worse. We have to help and do what we can.”
“There are a lot of issues that people are fighting over,” says James Ang, 17. “As more people get involved, more things happen. Just like the power plant that shut down a few months ago. That was a big step in keeping the environment clean.”
Bass says students realize they have power as consumers to improve the environment. They inform new students that they had better start composting and that it’s not good to eat in fast food outlets because rain forests are being cut down in third-world countries to graze the cattle for that industry.
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Dezabee Miles |
A moment of truth came when Bass was showing the film An Inconvenient Truth about the effects of global warming. “Instead of being bored, the kids were really into it,” she says. “One girl even asked us to pause it so she could go to the bathroom and not miss any of it.”
UESF member Dezabee Miles, a community resource specialist who works with the students and often chaperones WALC field experiences, thinks it’s “fantastic” how the students have become environmentally and politically aware. The students are filled with pride that he attributes to their involvement with WALC.
Miles, a classified employee who is working on his teaching credential, is also “proud to be part of this. We are helping to make the community aware of how to help eradicate the negatives that are going on in Bay View and Hunters Point. We are helping to make things safer for families, children and pets that live here.”
