Environmental Schools

As much discussion as the talk about greening schools is getting, one of the ideas that rarely gets mentioned, is the idea of the rooftop garden, or "green roof". We first came across the idea in Germany and Italy a decade ago while travelling, and while we thought it was a neat idea, promptly forgot about it until we visited one of the newer schools in southeast Calgary. A large, multi-levelled building, it has a second floor meeting space that overlooks a flat first floor roof and the a small grove of trees on the lawn beyond. It did not tak much imagination to picture a door leading out to a rooftop garden to provide staff with a place to visit in the warm summer months.

Sadly it seems, even the CBC ran a story last week on the slowly growing trend for rooftop gardens, it appears that such a thing will remain years away. If school districts are struggling financially to maintian their existing infrastructure, the added expense of a rooftop garden looks to be an unattainable luxury.