Throughout my over 40 years of teaching at all levels, including elementary school, middle school, high school and college I have always been interested in environmental aspects of public health. When I retired from teaching health education and public health at UNO, I taught Energy Policy at Creighton University.
As a musician I have performed environmental songs at numerous Earth Day Omaha celebrations over the years. I’ve created my own YouTube music videos, many of which are about environmental issues. Currently I am the energy committee chair and the legislative committee chair of the Nebraska Sierra Club.
It was when I was on the planning committee for the Nebraska Youth Climate Summit that it occurred to me that there is a need to know more about what Nebraska schools are doing in terms of sustainability. Little did I know that Seamus Haney would step forward to do a lot of research that made this project a reality. I am grateful for Seamus and his other friends who helped with this webpage.
It’s not often that people volunteer for a project that has never been done before. I hope that this webpage is useful to the readers of The Leaflet.
I wish Seamus well as he enters his college career. If his work on this project and on The Leaflet, are any indication, he will certainly excel in college and beyond.
Over the past 8 months The Leaflet has worked hard to compile information about over forty schools in Nebraska.
We have reached out to 44 schools across Nebraska. We reached out to 2 representatives at each school.
Of those 88 emails, we managed to obtain responses/information from 25 of those schools.
We compiled this information into simple Google Documents and posted the hyperlinks on a website in order to have a unified database of all the schools and the information about what they do (and don’t do) for the environment.
To complete the website’s outward appearance, we created a logo for the top of the website. David Corbin of the Sierra Club worked to obtain information about Electric Busing systems and other environmental programs in Nebraska and the United States to be posted at the bottom of the page.
The page is linked at the bottom of this article. But before you click on this link, I’d like to make note that this whole project would not have been possible without the kindness and remarkable passion of David Corbin. His initiation of the project and subsequent patience and dedication has been what’s made this project possible.
I’d also like to give a special shoutout to my friends, Lauren Schmidt and Connor Juracek for their work reaching out to schools and making my job a lot easier. You guys are the best.
If you are a representative of a school and it was not featured in this article (but you’d like to be), reach out to David Corbin at [email protected].
~ Seamus Haney