Research Resources
One of our primary resources that we researched was a nearby school district's recently published policy regarding sustainability in their school district.
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Understanding Bellevue School District's Strategy
After studying Bellevue School District's example as a baseline for what to expect out of future sustainability initiative plans, internal outreach began to understand how Bellevue went about developing their policy, and the strategical wording implemented to ensure action is taken.
As apart of their original policy passed in Earth Month of 2023, there was a 4-pillar structure.
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District Resources
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Environmental Safety
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Collective Understanding
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Student Voice ​
However this structure shifted over time as the policy continued to receive feedback and editing suggestions, resulting in the 3-pillar structure, combining the previous pillars 3 & 4.​
Other Policies Researched
Along with understanding a local perspective of a sustainability policy, we developed a strategy to view a variety of other non-local published policies that we wanted ISD to strive towards.
Something we paid particular attention to was the population size of each non-local district policies, and reflecting on how that might affect their formatting and depth, while also finding the best examples of aspects from these policies and plans that could be applied towards the Issaquah School District.
Presenting to the Issaquah School Board to request a Sustainability Policy
On March 28th, 2024, my team and I first approached the Issaquah School District Board during the regular board meetings for public comment. This was the first step in getting our voices out to the entire school board with public attention.
Prior to this public comment, we met with the school districts Operations Manager, Facilities Manager, and a newly elected school board member to present on our ideas and get feedback. We also asked to receive any further information on what the school district has been doing in regards to sustainability directly and indirectly, as this information is either not public knowledge or difficult to understand in the public records. We wanted to acknowledge these things before making our public comment to celebrate what has been done so far, but that our supporters and cities would like to see a more formatted, officialized documentation of the important points.
Presentation from March 28th, 2024
To prepare for our first public comment appearance in front of the school board, scripts were developed to assist us in ensuring every point we wanted to talk about was covered.
We also sent an email to the school board a day before the meeting to provide them with materials, references, and outlets for questions.
Watch the full presentation below!
Feedback We Recieved
After presenting to the school board for the first time, our feedback from them was to begin developing a policy in the context of the Issaquah School District, rather then just providing examples of other published school district policies.
Our next step was to utilize the Bellevue School District policy as a baseline to develop a student recommended policy for the school board.