Southwest High School

3414 W. 47th St. , Minneapolis, MN 55410
Green Team

The Green Team works hard to get the job done!

Every week you take out your recycling and you bring a reusable grocery bag to the store, you may even have already switched your incandescent bulbs to CFLs (Compact Fluorescent Lights). What does it mean to go green, and how do you do it? The Green Team has answers on how to save the environment.

The Green Team is a group of dedicated students from Southwest Community Education working to make a big change. By providing educational workshops, hosting guest speakers, demonstrations, and community service projects the Green Team hopes to educate the community about the importance of making smart decisions regarding our lifestyles and how it effects the environment. Over fifty students sent in applications to participate in the Green Team this year. With so many students we have big plans for reducing energy costs at Southwest High School and in the surrounding communities of Fulton and Linden Hills. Already this year the Green Team has gone out into the community to weatherize, very inexpensively, the windows of the elderly.

The Green Team has been working tirelessly acquiring grants. With the money from the grants we plan to buy supplies to build weatherized window frames for the classrooms to cut the cost of heating our school. Currently we are looking into installing filters into our drinking fountains to improve water quality thus eliminating the need for bottled water. In the future we hope to purchase solar panels that will help to heat our pool. This alternative energy source will cut energy costs for our school.

We hope you will join the Green Team for one of our up coming events including: three environmental workshops with topics ranging from organics to carbon footprint. In April we are organizing an Earth Day clean up. If you would like to contact the Green Team with questions or comments, or for more information about our upcoming events available to the public please contact Mr. Neiman at (612) 688-3100.

Remember all the little things you do can make a big difference!
Tom Neiman, tom.neiman@mpls.k12.mn.us

SW Window Weatherization

Energy conservation

The Green Team is building wooden frames that will fit into our school windows. The frames have plastic on both sides to help insulate our windows and keep wind from blowing through the old metal window frames. The wooden windows fit sunggly in our windows with a rubber gasket around the edge. These windows are removable and resusable so we can put them in during the cold winter months and take them out and store them during the summer.

Our goals is to make the class rooms warmer, reduce the amount of energy needed to heat our school, and save money by reducing the heating bill in our school. By insulating our windows we will be reducing the amount of fuel that is needed to heat our school, which helps to cut our carbon foot print.

R.O.T. Reduce Our Trash

Other

This year as part of the Minneapolis School District’s initiative to GO GREEN, Southwest has begun a three-part compost, recycling and trash program. We have stations set-up around our school that include three different colored barrels. The BLUE barrel is for mixed recycling; cans, bottles, etc. The GREEN barrel is for compost; food scraps and paper products. The RED barrel is for anything that can’t be either recycled or composted, plastic wrap, Styrofoam, and other trash.

Southwest is the only highschool in the district with this program in place this year. Our goal is to be a leader and great example for other highschools in the district to learn from. We want to educate students about the proper way to dispose of trash. We hope that this program will reduce the amount of trash the school produces and encourages recycling both in and out of school.