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SUSTAINABILITY

Go Green Forsyth

Go Green Forsyth is Forsyth's "Green Team" for sustainability. At Forsyth, we strive to be responsible stewards of the environment; sustainability is an important part of our culture.

In 1987, the United Nations Brundtland Commission defined sustainability as “meeting the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”

Missouri Green Schools

Missouri Green Schools is a joint program of the Missouri Gateway Green Building Council and the Missouri Environmental Education Association that supports growth through a continuous loop of tracking and advancing sustainability practices. Participating schools are honored annually at emerging, progressing, and advanced levels for their achievements across five levels of recognition. Criteria are rooted in best practices and scaffolded to support growth toward long-term, whole-school sustainability.

Level 2: Sprout schools are honored for goal setting, benchmarking, and tracking improvement toward the further advancement of green and healthy practices. Level 3: Seedling schools additionally document a sustainability-related achievement in at least one educational program. Level 4: Sapling schools additionally document the long term impacts of their conservation efforts over 1–3 years.

Forsyth received Sprout-level recognition in 2021, Seedling-level recognition in 2022, and Sapling-level recognition in 2023.

History of Annual Initiatives

Professional Development

Forsyth has partnered with the Missouri Botanical Garden's Earthways Center to facilitate a series of faculty and staff professional development sessions during the 2023/24 school year. These sessions focus on developing sustainability principles for Forsyth School, including (but not limited to):

  • Creating a working definition of sustainability for the Forsyth School community
  • Drafting principles of education for sustainability at Forsyth
  • Incorporating the principles of education for sustainability into Forsyth's campus, curriculum, and culture
  • Demonstrating alignment between the principles of education for sustainability and the practice on campus

Turn Out the Lights Campaign

During the 2022/23 school year, Forsyth's Class of 2023 led a campus-wide grassroots Turn Off the Lights campaign consisting of helpful signage posted near all light switches throughout the eight buildings on Forsyth's 4.5-acre campus.

Forsyth Waste Ambassadors

During the 2022/23 school year, Go Green Forsyth established a Waste Ambassadors program for students in the Upper Division (Grades 3–6) to support and promote Forsyth’s composting and recycling efforts within and among the entire school community.

Forsyth Arbor Walk

During the 2020/21 school year, the USGBC-Missouri Gateway Chapter reimagined the Green School Quest as monthly sustainability challenges for participating schools throughout Missouri and Southern Illinois.

Forsyth's Class of 2021 chose to focus on trees and their many benefits: carbon capture, habitat, food source, cooling effect, stress reduction, erosion prevention, water filtration, and art inspiration (to name a few!). First, the students learned about tree classification at Pershing Park in the Parkview Neighborhood in University City. Then, they compared these trees to those on the Forsyth School campus, aided by a student-created species treemap from 2013.

Inspired by the Arbor Walk at Washington University in St. Louis, Grade 6 created a Forsyth Arbor Walk and website for the entire Forsyth community to access, learn from, and enjoy. The students chose 17 trees on campus with “stories to tell” and developed a QR code for each species linked back to the site. Explore the Arbor Walk