For November, we’re shining our light on the School of Environmental Studies in Apple Valley, Minnesota. To get the scoop on this cool school we hung out with teacher Molly Sheeley Melton to find out how learning has no borders, zoos aren’t just for animals and even Prom can be recycled.

You teach at the School of Environmental Science in Apple Valley, MN. What is that, exactly?
SES is an optional high school in a large, public suburban school district. Think of us as a magnet school. Students can elect to attend SES for their junior and senior years. We have four large high schools in our district, the fourth largest in the state, that all have around 2000 or more students. Our school has only 400 students.

Is SES a private school? Who goes there?
SES is a public high school. We have students of every kind attending the school; they really represent the range of students you would see at the other high schools in our district. It’s a small environment with a very different approach to learning from what you might see in a typical public high school. That is what draws a lot of students to SES.

How is your curriculum different from that of a traditional high school?
Our curriculum centers on an interdisciplinary course that blends science, Social Studies and English/Language Arts. The focus is environmental studies, with the junior year centering on understanding the natural world and how it operates and the senior year concentrating on the managed world. So we move from understanding—and hopefully appreciating—our natural surroundings, to looking critically at how politics, law, values, social and cultural perspectives, and economics come into play in terms of making decisions about the world we live in.

Wow! That sounds like a lot to convey in the classroom.
SES has a very real-world, practical, hands-on approach to learning. We are out in the field as much as possible, even in the frigid temperatures of the Minnesota winters studying outdoor survival skills. We also study issues that the world is currently facing. We believe there is a great value in this approach to education.

Outdoor Survival Skills sounds a lot more interesting than the classes we took in high school!
SES is a public school and therefore, follows the graduation requirements for our district and the State of Minnesota. Our students also take a range of other classes such as Chemistry, Physics, Art, Photography, Multimedia, Math, and foreign languages. We also offer numerous Advanced Placement (AP) courses.

We’ve heard about some Intensive Themes courses. What are they?
At the end of each trimester, we take a break from our regular schedule for Intensive Theme. This is a class that students take all day for seven school days. It’s similar to what colleges have with J-term or May-term. Intensive Theme (IT) allows us to broaden the scope of what we teach, as well as to take students into the field even more to learn. Some IT courses are held at school. Some of these include Poetry Workshop, Agro-ecology, Eco-Architecture, Marine Biology, Ornithology, Human Medicine, Wilderness Survival, Philosophy of Indigenous Peoples, Scuba Certification, Animal Behavior, Wildlife Painting, A Capitol Voyage in Policy and Law, and Theater in the City. At the same time, we really bring students into the field on Field Studies, where students travel all over the planet to engage in fieldwork and meaningful learning experiences in the environments themselves. We travel to the BWCAW (Boundary Waters) in Minnesota in both winter and spring, Alaska, Southern Florida, Glacier National Park, Yucatan, Curacao, Belize, Costa Rica, France/Spain, Iceland, Scotland, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, and others. And we aren’t just taking trips and guided tours to these places. Students are immersing themselves in different cultures and ecosystems in order to better understand the world and its people. They are incredible learning experiences.

Closer to home, SES is located at the Minnesota Zoo. How much involvement do you and your students have with the animals and the zoo?
Our students have access to the Zoo every day. They head over for specific class activities, but are also able to undertake individual projects like taking photos or conducting animal observations. We work with the Zoo staff to coordinate unique learning opportunities.

What environmental issues seem to be top priority for your students?
Well, our students’ interests vary depending on our units of study. The juniors might be more focused on conservation whereas the seniors may be studying biodiversity. We cover all sorts of environmental issues including population, human and environmental health (pollution, air quality, infectious disease, toxicology), sustainability, and climate change. Last year the students really rallied around the idea of reducing our carbon footprints and students participated in a Carbon Challenge. Their passions evolve in a truly organic way and vary from year to year.

SES must be a very green school!
Well, “green” has a variety of interpretations, but we do embrace practices that would be considered green. We use all recycled paper and attempt to cut our overall use of paper. We carpool to field trips as much as possible to cut down on carbon emissions. Students are encouraged to bike to school. Of course, we recycle. We do park clean-ups on Earth Day and the school has a stretch of road it has adopted to keep clean. Our outdoor classroom is built entirely of recycled materials. We monitor and analyze the school’s indoor air quality. This year, a wind turbine is being built at the school. It’s a major opportunity for our students to learn about wind power and it brings attention to this topic in our local community. We are very excited about it!

Do you have school dances?
We have several school dances over the year. The most notable is our Recycled Formal. Though it came into existence before I began working at SES, I believe it evolved as sort of an anti-prom. It’s held in January and instead of going out and spending hundreds of dollars on new dresses, tux rentals, hair and make-up, dinner at expensive restaurants and limos, SES students head to local thrift and secondhand stores or their parents’ closets, to find formal attire. Some students “recycle” clothes they’ve worn to previous dances and the more ambitious make their own unique outfits out of recycled or discarded materials. I’ve seen some pretty amazing—and fashionable—dresses made of garbage bags and duct tape. The students really embrace the concept of the Recycled Formal. As a chaperone, I’ve even worn several of my mom’s formals from her days in high school. It’s fun and I think it takes some pressure off, allowing students to focus on what really matters—and evening of dancing and having fun with friends.

Do all of your students graduate from SES as bonafide tree huggers?
At the end of their senior year, students are asked to engage the question, Sustainability considered, how then shall I live? We hope students have studied many aspects of environmental studies and are ready to make decisions about what they want in their personal lives as well as the world they’ll live in.

Photographs courtesy of the School of Environmental Studies