With all the money being spent on the alternative energy initiatives here is an initiative that starts from the ground up, is as much about the future as any alternative energy plan ever could be, and yet gets almost no funding from the government. Funding is done on a state and county level as well as private donations, which is a good thing, but it should go far deeper than that.

I mean, how many of you parents would love to know that when your children go to school they are learning, not only the basics of education, but also the basics of conservation and responsibility? And we can take that a step farther and say, how many students would love to embrace the environment through studies and hands on teaching? This is what we mean by green ideas for the classroom.

Public and private schools being what they are, and I am not in any way dissing these institutions one bit, can only do so much with the curriculums that they are allowed to teach. I myself came up through the public school domain, my core principles about the environment stemmed from a sociology class I was a part of in high school. But teaching about the environment was a fringe experience and not the norm. I suspect that in modern public and private schools, although awareness has changed, the teaching policies haven’t advanced much since I was in school.

Well, here are a couple of schools that deviate from the normal everyday run-of-the-mill teaching institution, that are willing to incorporate the environment into classes, but not so much by teaching alone, but by being hands-on. Now there may be others, but these two stand out. One is the Fox River Academy Environmental School, and the other is the Manassas Park Elementary School They have gone green not just by teaching about the environment, but by living it with their construction, their practices and the fact that the schools themselves are the curriculum that are totally hands on working examples of what going green is all about!

Thanks to the communities along with the state and local governments, as well as individual donations, they are teaching green from the ground up. And folks, there is no better way to go green when the students in our schools learn about the environment, alternative energy, and ways to be natural and organic, then to learn it in school at an elementary level.

My question is, with all the Obama initiative money floating around out there, this should be one of the priorities for spending it. If these schools can do it on a local level, ANY school should be able to do it with a little government funding. Yes, I am all in favor of the current administrations green energy initiatives, but our schools should be the starting point about learning how to be green. Teaching and learning green at school levels, using a building that is full of energy efficient solutions as well as alternative methods, is the perfect medium for students to not only learn green, but live it, every day of their lives.

I applaud these schools for going down the green pathway that they are. They set shining examples of what can be, and what should be in all the schools across America. Mr Obama, are you listening?