Montessori Green School Initiative Mapping Project

The Montessori Green School Initiative Mapping Project, carried out for the Montessori School in Redlands, is one part of the Green School Initiative, which integrates efforts to reduce the school’s ecological footprint, helps create a healthier school environment, and gets the community thinking about solutions to sustainability problems. This mapping project is important because it helps the students in visualizing concepts via maps, which is a good way to involve children early in map reading skills and environmental awareness. This helps perpetuate the ecological movement of saving the planet. The Montessori School’s primary problem was the inability for the faculty, students, and parents to visualize the school’s twenty-six acres of data geographically. The school needed help implementing the initiative strategically, so analysis was an important part of their conservation objective and in determining and implementing some of the key areas of the Montessori’s Green School Initiative (GSI). The client required a system that combined environmental education with mapping and analysis techniques, while utilizing geographic information system (GIS) over the web. The categorized trees, campus, and usage data, as well as the carpool and “Safe Bike Bus” maps, supply their website with the information they need to help the environment. The resultant is the ability to edit the tree characteristics (category, type, size, health, diameter, and mineral deficiency), and the ability to update and analyze their utility and usage data over a web-based GIS system