by Kylie Chen (’24) | March 22, 2024

As climate change becomes a more visible part of everyday life, from increasingly hot summers to frequent wildfires, sustainability is becoming a more pressing issue around the world and on the Saint Francis campus. While the school is currently working toward becoming sustainable, grassroots movements started by different Saint Francis students and faculty have been pushing for the school to take more significant action.

With the construction of the Eggers Innovation Center and the Welcome Center, Saint Francis now needs to abide by regulations issued by the City of Mountain View, which required the school to incorporate multiple sustainable elements inside and outside the new buildings, including solar panels, drought-resistant landscaping, automatic lights, double-paned glass, and purple pipes, which will provide recycled water to Saint Francis from the city. The regulations are also requiring the school to reduce its number of available parking spots to cut down the amount of cars coming onto campus.

While Saint Francis community members are happy that the school has more incentive to increase its sustainability, several people expressed frustration because they feel that nothing will progress unless the city requires it, even if leadership, faculty members, and students want change to occur. The “Green Team” (a group of Saint Francis educators dedicated to making campus more sustainable), for example, advocated for Saint Francis to shift away from using fossil fuel energy and switch to solar, but it wasn’t until the school was subjected to requirements from the City of Mountain View that it actually installed solar panels.

Ms. Emily Thomas, Saint Francis’s AP Environmental Science teacher, former Sustainability Coordinator, and member of the Green Team, explained that with Saint Francis balancing a huge budget, “it’s difficult to get every single initiative over the line,” so the City of Mountain View has “provided a lot of the push for [Saint Francis] to commit to things that teachers want, students want, [and] leadership wants but maybe didn’t always have a justification for, other than this is the right thing to do.”

As a result of the perceived lack of initiative from the school, many members of the Saint Francis community have started their own initiatives to improve sustainability on campus.

For the past four years, April Beyersdorf (’24) has been an outspoken advocate for sustainable commuting, working with teachers, faculty, and administrators to propose ways to make sustainable commuting more accessible to people on campus. Recently, she organized two trial days for an after-school shuttle bus from campus to Mountain View Caltrain Station in collaboration with Mr. Robert Copple, Saint Francis’s facilities director.

“Many students have emailed me or talked to me in person, saying how thankful they are for this, and even though there is no way that we can make it permanent right now, I’m very glad that we were able to have this trial day because now Mr. Copple and campus logistics understand that a lot of students would ride an after-school shuttle, which I have been trying to prove for four years,” Beyersdorf told The Lancer in an interview. She also expressed her gratitude toward Mr. Copple for his willingness to put her ideas into practice.

Unfortunately, not all of Beyersdorf’s activism has been successful. This April, she had planned to hold a car-free campus day—a day where all members of the Saint Francis community would commute to campus sustainably. Part of the purpose of this day was to show students that commuting sustainably is possible and to provide easily accessible information on public transit routes and bike safety, which she saw as two of the major factors preventing students from commuting sustainably.

When the idea of organizing a car-free campus day came about, she told The Lancer, “Given my previous record of working with the school, I didn’t think they would actually follow through with it… I tried to get an after-school shuttle started last year and was met with only a voluntary response survey in the daily announcement for a few weeks… and before that, there was my complaint about the bike racks being inconveniently placed and nothing being done about that. Overall, I didn’t have much faith in the school changing their policy.” 

Despite her concerns and the massive scale of the project, Beyersdorf felt more confident once she received assurance from Ms. Katie Teekell (Saint Francis’s principal) and Ms. Sue Reyneri (Saint Francis’s CFO) that she had the support of the school behind her. However, her plans ultimately fell through due, from her perspective, to misunderstandings and a lack of communication from the school administration.

Beyersdorf’s Independent Inquiry teacher, Mr. Grant Lucas, reasoned that there are multiple societal obstacles bigger than Saint Francis that made Beyersdorf’s goal, while important, difficult to achieve: “[On] this side of the country, the infrastructure was built around the automobile, and so it’s very hard to imagine the concept of our American society moving away from our dependence on cars… As hard as April could work and as much as other people could work with her, it’s just something we’re so reliant on.”

Mr. Zack Herhold, the former moderator of Beyersdorf’s Sustainable Commuters Club, added, “One of the unfortunate parts of Saint Francis drawing kids from all over the Bay Area… is that commuting becomes a little bit of a logistical challenge for many high schoolers.” He also noted that part of making campus more sustainable involves creating a culture of sustainability, and “that’s not done by individuals… what you really need if you want to fix sustainability is a critical mass.”

Though Beyersdorf agreed that societal barriers to her work exist, she argued that changing culture “requires participation from both… individuals and the people who make the policies.” She also said, “If there are students or educators who speak that they want to make change, and it’s something that the school agrees with, then the school should be taking ownership of that.”

Ms. Jennifer Thomas, the chief of Saint Francis’s Science Department, has also been a big advocate for systemic change. In an interview with The Lancer, she discussed the important role policy plays in shifting culture: “Fossil fuel companies have tried to pin climate change on the individual person, but it’s really about making the system changes so that sustainable practices become automatic for people.” 

Around 2016, J. Thomas formed the Green Team with E. Thomas and other members of the Science and Religious Studies Departments, advocating for the installation of the FloWater stations around campus as part of a campaign to get rid of all single-use water bottles on campus.

Another initiative the Green Team started was getting tri-bin waste containers on campus to promote the composting of food waste, another major source of Saint Francis’s carbon dioxide emissions. This project was headed by E. Thomas. However, during the COVID-19 pandemic, most of the progress that the Green Team made was reversed. The tri-bin waste containers were removed (although the Saint Francis kitchen does still compost its food waste), and single-use plastics returned. J. Thomas told The Lancer that when the pandemic hit, “Everything fell apart… When we returned, of course, everything had to be dispensed in a single-use thing because we were all worried about passing the coronavirus on, and it just has not recovered yet… Anytime I’ve talked about it with the administration, I keep getting told that it will come once this new Welcome Center is up.” 

While Saint Francis has undoubtedly made progress toward becoming more sustainable, the lack of specific and accessible information about its sustainability projects poses an issue, especially since it has resulted in a disconnect between what is actually happening on campus and the community’s perception. “I only know [what is happening] because I saw the plans, and I talked to Mr. Copple and Mr. Houlihan, who had Mr. Copple’s job before he retired… I’m also on the planning commission, and I know what the reach codes are for the City of Mountain View,” E. Thomas told The Lancer. “I don’t think the school has done a good job with educating people [about the changes made] on campus… and I do truly think it’s a missed opportunity because [the new buildings are] very sustainable in a lot of ways, and if we advertised that, it would create a better sense of ownership of this is what we do at Saint Francis.”