Halton District School Board joins nine others in an agreement with Mohawk college to focus on students and climate change

News 100 blueBy Staff

February 11th, 2020

BURLINGTON, ON

 

The Halton District School Board announced an historic agreement today with Mohawk College and nine Ontario school boards for a voluntary agreement establishing a large-scale learning partnership offering students opportunities for new skills, curriculum connections and research, as they learn first-hand how to reduce the carbon footprints in their schools.

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Parents listening to how the iStem program at Aldershot was going to work. The second grade 9 class will start in September.

The initiative, called Climate Change Leaders, has a potential audience of 270,000 students in the participating school boards, giving young people a more active role in reducing carbon emissions in their schools while helping Canada move one step closer to meeting its obligation to the Paris accord.

In addition, Mohawk College will introduce micro-credits in Climate Change and related topics for students, teachers and staff.

This exciting partnership is exploring enhanced experiential learning opportunities for students and teachers in the areas of science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM), offering new pathways for students toward co-op placements, apprenticeships and new jobs in a low carbon, circular economy.

To transform schools to lower carbon will require school boards to examine deep building system retrofits for mechanical and electrical building systems. Once most of the energy waste is removed, the next phase is to develop on-site renewable energy systems such as solar, geothermal and battery storage. The investment funding aspiration is to use energy saved from retrofits and energy produced from renewable technologies to fund capital investment. Financially, this will have no impact on taxpayers, while exploring the creation of many new jobs, apprenticeships and student co-ops.

Stuart Miller

Stuart Miller, HDSB Director of Education

Today, the partners gathered to sign a non-binding, collaborative memorandum of understanding, agreeing that the climate crisis is well documented and the path is clear: we must dramatically reduce greenhouse gas emissions and transition to a low-carbon economy. Working together, they commit to increase their efforts to help solve the climate crisis and explore opportunities to combine technology demonstrations with experiential learning, while building the capabilities and capacity to transform to a low-carbon community.

Stuart Miller, who was interviewed on CBC Radio earlier on Tuesday said that the MOU between Mohawk College and a number of School Boards in this area is a wonderful opportunity and an example of educational bodies collaborating to address the challenges of climate change.

The school boards represent 250,000 students and it is the synergy of us all working together that will do much to address our environmental issues in this part of Ontario.

 

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