The Rural Sustainable School

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This document proposes the development of a new model for rural education transformation: the Sustainable School. The Community School in Tamworth, NH is an early stage prototype for such a school design.

This document seeks resources to help the Community School further evolve its educational design; benchmark other models in other parts of the country; and test the viability of the business design with conservationists; philanthropists; educators; and community and economic development organizations.

A Sustainable School does more than just educate students. It also preserves and restores the community’s ecosystems; helps build the social fabric of the community; and contributes to local economic development.

A sustainable school has the following design characteristics:

• The curriculum is organized around the core themes of sustainability, stewardship, and social justice.
• The learning design emphasizes experiential and service learning that allow students to work on real sustainable development projects in their communities. Students perform real work and contribute original research to natural resource management strategies.
• The school is linked to a set of working economic assets that seek to model sustainability principles in their operations. These assets create opportunities for experiential learning; generate income for the school; and create economic development opportunities for the community.
  

In the most fully developed model of a Sustainable School, a significant portion of the school’s budget would be derived from the earnings of its working assets.

We believe the model developed through this process could be useful to many different rural regions of the country that are facing a similar set of challenges.