A “Green Team” enlisted woodworking students to building planters, recruited art students to paint recycling bins, pulled biology students into growing and studying plants and helped Life Skills students assess and perform tasks needed to maintain a green environment at Elizabeth Forward High School.

The cross-curricular design of the Green Team project was one of the attributes that helped win it a $2,433 award in The Consortium for Public Education’s semi-annual Great Idea Grants competition. Seven teachers participated in the grant application, noted Patti Hoke, Coordinator for The Consortium for Public Education’s Great Idea Grants program. “Our review committee loves to see collaboration among educators and among students,” she said. “This was a great example.”

At some other schools Hoke visited to observe fruition of this year’s grants first hand, students built guitars, learned about solar energy, explored robotic technology and practiced yoga.  The guitars, solar learning and robotics projects took place at Central Westmoreland Career and Technology Center, while the yoga sessions were part of a “Move for Health” program undertaken for special education students at McKeesport Area High School.

The projects were among 33 that The Consortium funded during the 2009-2010 school year. Together, grants for the current school year amounted to nearly $49,000. Since the Great Idea Grants program began in 1987, more than $1.39 million of awards have been made as a means of supporting projects and activities that help classroom lessons come alive.

Elizabeth Forward's Green Team plants trees, tends new garden.






McKeesport Area High School students get in shape.