TUCSON, Ariz. — With its vegetable garden, rainwater cisterns and dedication to teaching kids how to cuddle with Mother Earth, Civano Community School in southeast Tucson fits right into a neighborhood designed to be more at ease than at odds with the planet.

The Civano neighborhood was created with goals to reduce water and energy usage and the amount of waste going into landfills. The school, a charter school sponsored by the Vail School District, just seemed to be a natural extension of these goals.

“They recycle everything,” said Connie Erickson, Civano Community School principal.

Erickson, who is also principal for a new school, Senita Valley Elementary, opening in July, has her office offsite, but maintains contact with lead teacher and school founder, Pam Bateman.

The students and teachers really take conservation to heart, including the principle of reuse. They use “every corner” of each sheet of paper before recycling it, she said.

Erickson called the school a very special school setting.

“They’ve created a unique culture there,” she said. “In listening to the kids talk, (I’ve found that) they carry things they learn at school home.”

Alongside recycling, Erickson said the school provides reusable plates and silverware for the children, grades Kindergarten through fifth, to eat their meals. No paper is used for eating, not even paper towels, she added. The school has a washer and dryer in its office.

Susan Michal, the “youngers,” or Kindergarten and first grade, teacher, said the school buildings were designed to be “green.”

She said cisterns for capturing rainwater, solar panels and a compost bin were some of the features the founders had in mind when designing the building, which was helped along by Phil Swaim, the same architect who designed the new Lee H. Brown Family Conservation Learning Center at Tucson’s Reid Park Zoo.

The new school’s buildings conformed to special Civano neighborhood building codes to ensure they would benefit the earth with other features, like on-demand heaters, Michal said, which only heat the amount of water needed in an instant, rather than gallons and gallons of water in a traditional water heater.

A quick walk around to the northeast side of the classroom building reveals a garden full of edible plants, including lettuce and a variety of herbs.

Michal said the elements of the school complement each other, including using composted material for fertilizer and reserved rainwater from a large cistern to nourish the garden.

She added that the teachers want to build a commercial kitchen that will enable them to cook and serve the food they grow. Right now, the kids are allowed to pick what they want from the garden and take it home or just eat it.

Any veggie scraps from meals would be placed in the compost bin, which would complete the circle of life for the garden.

Bateman said the kitchen, along with a community room, was in the original building plans, but had to be eliminated due to financial limitations.

She said the current structures cost about $450,000 to build. To add on the community room and commercial kitchen would cost an additional $250,000.

After four years of waiting, the school is about to get these rooms — due in part to a $50,000 prize won in the Go Green and Small Search for the Greenest Grade School contest, sponsored by All Small and Mighty laundry detergent.

Michal said the people at All told the teachers they saw Civano, with only 66 students, as small and mighty, just like their product.

She said it felt strange when they received many congratulatory calls after the announcement on the Jan. 18 Ellen DeGeneres Show.

The school did not “go green” to win the contest, Michal said, but was being environmentally responsible already.

“This is just who we are,” she said.



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