Building a more sustainable community at East

Each day, Cherry Hill East students spend 7 hours at school (perhaps even longer due to extracurricular activities after school), alongside East teachers and staff. Thousands of people in one building for at least seven hours a day can generate a ton of plastic, paper, and other products, as well as use up a lot of energy. In fact, according to a Harvard Graduate School of Education research paper, schools are actually one of the largest consumers of energy, and produce the equivalent to 15 million cars, annually. By taking steps to become more eco-friendly, not only can schools help drastically reduce greenhouse gas emissions but by leading by example, schools can help show students how to be more environmentally-friendly in their everyday lives as well.

As of now, Cherry Hill East has already undergone some renovations to make our school building more eco-friendly. For example, the classrooms and hallways at East currently use motion-sensor LED lights, saving both energy and money since the lights cannot be left on unoccupied. Many other renovations have been made throughout the district to help schools reduce energy consumption. Over the past few years, all of the boilers in district schools were upgraded to high efficiency units. Additionally, work was done at East last year to replace many of the windows and doors with more thermally-insulated (and effective) units.

Nevertheless, like any school, there are many possible improvements that could be made to reduce East’s carbon footprint and to increase its sustainability and environmental friendliness.