Contact: Amy Constant  

Tel: (919) 876-6317

Email: aconstant@need.org

Teachers can access NEED curriculum online. As resources are available, teacher workshops and hands-on kits are available. Individual state curriculum correlations are available here.

Forestville Road Elementary School

Knightdale, NC

Project Title: Super S.T.A.R.S

Project Adviser: Renee Roddick

It’s a bird, it’s a plane, no, it’s the SUPER S.T.A.R.S.! We’re here to save our planet one school at a time. Over the course of the year, we participated in many activities such as the Health Fair, the annual Christmas Parade, and in May we are going to be helping with our first ever Shred-A-Thon. At the parade, we teamed up with our Student Council and promoted energy tips with large posters, and our famous energy tip bookmarks. At the Health Fair, we brought our “Why Save Energy” display board to set up along with our ten-fact NEED resource posters. We also had Ms. Becki from the FEED the BIN program talk to us about how we can recycle better.

We continued the FEED the BIN program by collecting recyclable materials weekly, had morning announcements on energy information, made goals on how to recycle more and get more students and staff involved in making our school green. We collected trash on the playground with kindergarteners and went into the classrooms with our plays and activities to teach the younger students about the earth’s resources and how we can conserve them.

We will always be ready for another challenge to educate and conserve our resources!

NATIONAL ELEMENTARY LEVEL ROOKIE SCHOOL OF THE YEAR

Sedgefield Elementary School

Greensboro, NC

Project Title: We are Turned On To Turning It Off!

Project Adviser: Cheryl Kaufman

This is Sedgefield Elementary trying to be Energy Wise. It all started on January 29, 2011 in Smith High School where we went to different stations and learned more about saving energy. When we got back to our school, we split up into patrols and assigned each patrol to a different area in the school. Then we did a secret audit. We also had an assembly, made posters and PowerPoints, did daily announcements, made TV ads, and put games on the computers so everyone in the school would know what we were doing. When we were doing patrols, we also gave either a thank you ticket or a warning ticket, tips to save energy, and a light switch sticker to each classroom. We also did a Plug Load activity and made a box for anyone to put their receipts if they had replaced an incandescent bulb with a compact fluorescent. Switching bulbs could lower our energy bills! After all that, we got the kids to take a poll while going over the answers with them. Doing all that got us in the newspaper! I think saving energy is a great idea and cool!

Northern Guilford Middle School

Greensboro, NC

Project Title: Energy Wise Team Project

Project Adviser: Tameka Jordan

The goal of the Northern Guilford Middle School Energy Saving Project was threefold. First, we were to look at how much energy our campus was presently using. Second, we were to come up with ideas our campus and its individuals could use in order to save energy, and thirdly, we were to design ways to educate people on the importance of energy savings along with generating ideas on techniques which could be used. After we found out how much energy people were using (and potentially wasting), we developed a plan to revitalize and reshape their awareness. We did this by putting up posters, talking about ways to save energy on the morning announcements, and asking a group of students to go around and see if classrooms were actively participating in energy saving habits. We also posted an article in our Newsletter with tips on saving energy and picturing energy surveying team members. We believe that as a result of our energy saving awareness activities, people in our school are now actually saving more energy. Encouraged by these results, we are trying to motivate people to continue their new habits by producing a slideshow praising classes who are using the most tips, and broadcasting their names on the morning announcements. We have also issued a challenge to all classes to try and do better through the frequent use of tips we have given them.

Southern Guilford High School

Greensboro, NC

Project Title: Energy Education

Project Adviser: Mark Case

We at Southern Guilford High School have done many things to promote energy conservation awareness throughout our school and community. The first thing we did was have the Advanced Placement Environmental Science class calculate how much water could be saved by each person cutting 5 minutes off of a daily shower. We concluded that only 15 people could fill an Olympic sized pool twice a year by this one act.

Our Energy Ambassador Team consisted of six students from freshmen to seniors. We promoted saving energy by turning off computer monitors and printers at night, putting “Turn It OFF!” stickers on light switches and doing a complete lamp inventory of the school.

The results were incredible. We could save over $10,000 a year by turning off monitors and printers on nights and weekends county wide. We can save an additional $30,000 by changing the lamps in our school.

Our Energy Ambassador Team has just scratched the surface. We plan to do more in the next couple years with the support of our teachers and administrators.