Student Centered

Outdoor Program

Colorado Rocky Mountain School embraces the Leave-No-Trace ethic in the back country and the front country. Students begin learning during our Wilderness experience how to minimize their footprint. They make a direct connection between the beauty of the natural world and how their own behavior may damage it. When CRMS students leave a campsite, the next person to step foot on that land should not be able to tell that they had been there.

The sustainability ethic is incorporated into food choices for trips and into trip locations. Students weigh their packs upon leaving campus and weigh the waste they bring back to gain a better understanding of how to minimize waste. The Outdoor Program Committee evaluates trip sites, not only for their suitability for a given endeavor, but also for the distance from campus to minimize the use of fossil fuels.

Work Crews

Work Crews provide an avenue for students to take leadership roles and initiate change on campus toward creating a more sustainable life. The Recycling Work Crew maintains recycling stations in all the dorms and major buildings. They collect recycled materials and take them to the local recycling center. In the Garden Work Crew, students work to provide the school community with healthy organic food that is grown in a manner that minimizes the toll on the land. The Sustainability Work Crew brainstorms and problem-solves ways to improve our school’s efficiency. From educating the campus to adding weather stripping to all the obscure doorways on campus, the Sustainability Work Crew takes a variety of steps to minimize needless electrical, food, or heat waste. This Work Crew program allows passionate students to initiate change.Various student-led ideas have included: creating a sustainability dorm competition, a sustainability newsletter (humorously named The Toilet Paper), and a weekly “Green Tip” announcement to the entire school; changing our cleaning supplies to all-green products, measuring the campus energy usage, insulating the windows and doors, and researching better methods to improve our sustainability. While this work crew’s primary goal is to focus on sustainability, the rest of the work crews on campus (from Ranching to Electricity) also act under the green umbrella of sustainability.

In the Classroom

Colorado Rocky Mountain School has always linked the world outside the classroom to the world within. Through the study of Environmental Literature, Environmental History and Environmental Statistics, students gain the intellectual underpinnings to be able to understand and implement the school’s mission of sustainability. Whether enrolled in those specific environmental classes or not, students encounter discussions, at various times throughout the curriculum, about man’s impact on the world.