Tahoma High is now solar powered.

Well, part of it at least, now that an array of solar panels have been installed on the roof of the high school.

Having the panels installed is another piece of the Tahoma School District’s sustainability curriculum it has been integrating into its coursework from grade school through high school the past two years.

Tahoma High science teacher Mike Hanson explained that a grant application from Puget Sound Energy for a solar or wind powered demonstration project had come through, along with many other types of grant opportunities, about two years ago.

“I had spoken with another teacher about it last year and someone at the district, but, the timing wasn’t right to do the grant,” Hanson said. “This year, I worked with Clare Nance, who is another science teacher here. I said, ‘Do you want to partner on this?’ We can go in and work with the district as well to take what we get from the grant and apply it district wide.”

Not only did PSE give the district more than $16,000 in grant money, Hanson said, it provided teachers with curriculum materials which is a significant piece of the package.

Hanson and Nance worked with district finance director Lori Cloud.

“Lori gets stuff done,” Hanson said. “She’s the one who spearheaded, she’s the one who coordinated, she’s the one who took the little bit of information Clare and I gave her, the little information from the McKinstry Group (a firm the district has partnered with to reduce energy costs)… and put it all together in a package.”

PSE awarded the grant over the summer and Hanson met with staff from the utility, Micah Hammond, and Dave Leterro who works for the Bonneville Environmental Foundation, a group that supports schools in implementing sustainability curriculum.

The solar panels were then installed in October which required a PSE crew to also set up a meter that connected to the high school’s power grid and it also needed to be set up to send data to a website.

“We have a dedicated website where (it shows) data on watts produced, how much sunlight is shining on it,” he said.

What Hanson was most excited about was all the supporting lesson plans and materials he could use in the classroom to help students see science implemented in the real world.

“The curriculum include not just teacher instruction materials but kits that will expose kids to experimental design,” he said. “A kid who knows nothing about how a wind turbine works, boom, they’ll be able to build one from scratch right there. We have access now to all this data that we can cull and look for relationships. It is absolutely real world. It is exactly what you would want.”

Hanson teaches a class called Outdoor Academy while Nance teaches in the Global Academy, which is an integrated course for sophomores, combining inquire science, English and economics. Students receive laptops for use all year. The umbrella topics of the global academy are sustainability and systems thinking, Nance said in an e-mail.

In the first unit, Global Academy students focus on the food system, looking at overarching themes such as sustainability of the current food system and how can it be improved. In the second the focus is on global awareness where students are partnering with a group call ANYI to teach about education and building school houses in Afghanistan.

The final unit will focus on global climate change, Nance explained, which is where the PSE grant project comes into play.

“We hope to help the students become aware of their own actions and how their actions impact the environment and other organisms,” Nance said. “We plan to look at how they can change their behaviors. A study of alternate energy sources is key in this part of our curriculum. The solar panel project and the associated curricular materials will give the kids hand on experience with green energy such as solar and wind. Last year we visited Shadow Lake Bog and will hopefully do this again as the students are learning about the carbon cycle and carbon reservoirs.”

This project builds on a larger effort the school district has put forth to integrate sustainability themes into a number of classes. The curriculum starts in the third grade and continues all the way through senior year of high school.

In October, Assistant Superintendent for Teaching and Learning Nancy Skeritt explained that the district has had a belief in the value of students learning through the outdoors and the environment because it allows them to become self-directed learners, collaborative workers, effective communicators, community contributors, quality producers and complex thinkers — in other words, meet the district’s desired goals for its students.

“We believe that the environment is a really strong vehicle for kids doing activities to develop those particular outcomes and indicators,” Skerritt said in October. “The environment provides a wonderful vehicle for service learning and making community contributions. The third piece here is that we have a belief that our young people will have to make some critical decisions about our environment for themselves and their families.”

Tahoma High is now home to one of 23 educational solar powered projects, according to information provided by PSE, which has been providing grants for such projects and associated educational materials since 2004.