Chloe Mills, a senior at the Archer School for Girls, gave the keynote speech at the annual Green California Schools Summit and Exposition at the Pasadena Convention Center on September 28th. The Summit is the state’s largest annual gathering of green school leaders.
Chloe is the President of GYM (Green Youth Movement ) and is a student ambassador for the Environmental Education Initiative (EEI). The EEI curriculum was developed by the California Environmental Protection Agency in close coordination with the Department of Education and was the last curriculum approved by the State Board of Education. There are 85 units in all that cover standards from K-through-12. It is an environment-based curriculum – meaning that the California standards are taught through an environmental lens. EEI was put into practice because of a law initiated by State Senato
r Fran Pavley.
The speech focused on how GYM was formed by Ally Maize, a senior at Archer who was inspired by Al Gore’s “An Inconvenient Truth†and when she graduated and turned the reins of GYM over to Chloe in 2010, how Chloe found the EEI, which was exactly what the girls had been striving for. Chloe talked about how her dream was to be able to educate young children on the stewardship of the planet, so that when they become adults, good environmental behavior would be second nature to them.
She told how the EEI curriculum engages students so that they learn to understand how they influence the environment and how it influences them. She talked about how the members of GYM go out into the California schools and present the curriculum to administrators and teachers so that more schools can adopt it. It is currently in more that 600 schools in the state and Chloe voiced her optimism that the initiative would spread nationwide.
