Huzzah for Green Schools!

Remember back when you were in grade school, when every other week there was either a choir performance, a really bad play featuring half the kindergarten class dressed up as trees or something, a community bake sale, or any of a host of other extracurricular activities your parents ostensibly wanted to know about?

Right, so do I, but at the time, for some reason I never remembered to tell my mom that I needed a home-made tree costume until the night before the play, and come to think of it, none of the other kids ever bothered telling their parents about any of these functions either. So the schools would send home newsletters with us in our already-cluttered backpacks so our parents would be kept in the know.

Of course, that never really happened either -- those newsletters would either be mixed in with the local paper, junk mail from the pizza place, and the ever-present pile of bills on the kitchen table, and therefore lost until two months after the tree-costume-debacle, or else they would never make it out of my backpack and I wouldn't find them again until it came time to throw out all my leftover homework at the end of the school year. Pretty wasteful, and very inefficient all around.

Luckily, school boards in Illinois have gotten the hint and decided to kill two birds with one stone, by opting to provide an online school newsletter in place of the old paper variety. Their reasoning was twofold. First, the online newsletter is a far greener option as it cuts down on what I can only assume are millions of tons of waste paper every year that never actually get to the parents anyway. Second is related to the first -- having an online option in this day and age is actually a far more reliable way to get information to parents when their kids (like me) drop the ball and forget to hand off the newsletter.

It's a simple but effective idea, and I'm actually surprised that more schools haven't gotten on this bandwagon. If you have kids in a public school, bring up this idea at your next PTA meeting. Every little bit counts, folks!

Check out the original story here.