2008 Hero Awardees

Lillian Light

Lillian was instrumental in encouraging South Bay including Manhattan Beach, Hermosa Beach and Palos Verdes to become Cool Cities. She has also founder and President of the Environmental Priorities Network and an active member of the Audubon Society for many years.

Manhattan Beach Green Team

For publishing the Green report, we recognize that learning is the first step to improved stewardship our environment.

Geoff Dolan - City Manager
Jim Arndt - Director of Public Works
Lindy Coe-Juell - Assistant to the City Manager
Bruce Moe - Director of Finance
Richard Thompson - Director of Community Development
Rod Uyeda - Chief of Police

Grand View Planet Pals Lisa Coppedge, Suzanne Kretschmer, and Inga Middleton.

Planet Pals was formed and implemented such improvements as Walk to school Wednesdays and Trash Free Tuesdays. Planet Pals has also created a network of green minded school and city leaders.

Teacher Environmental Hero Awards:

Christie Dugas

Nominated by : Debbie Mabry

Christie Dugas serves Pacific School as a Science Specialist and provides exceptional Science instruction to students in Grades K-5.

Ms. Dugas provides weekly lab opportunities that support grade level classroom instruction and the California Science Standards in the areas of physical, life, earth, and investigation and experimentation. The scope of Ms. Dugas’ responsibilities are enormous as she must have a solid understanding of content standards for six grade levels in order to facilitate learning opportunities to support those standards.

On a weekly basis our Science lab activities are well organized, developmentally appropriate, reflective of state standards, and most importantly enthusiastically presented and fun! Additionally, she supports our Growing Great program by participating, leading classrooms in the lessons, and providing follow-up activities that support the environment. The Pacific Sea Lab also serves as a catalyst to lab experiments by allowing Ms. Dugas to further investigate ocean animals and how they adapt to their environment, focusing on habitats and the impact of water and air pollution on quality of life.

Pacific School is “Going Green” and Ms. Dugas is one of our school leaders on this environmental campaign. In the near future, in order to support the Recycling Program, she has planned a “Trash Timeline” Unit for the upper grades. This unit will increase understanding of the lifecycle of trash from our trashcans to the area landfills/dumps. We believe that this will spark continued awareness an interest on the environment.

Ms. Dugas is remarkable instructional leader and a dedicated member of the Pacific School Team. Please consider her as a noteworthy Earth Day candidate. If you require any additional information or have any questions, please contact me at Pacific School.

Tanya Sanchez

Nominated by: Paki Wolfe, Grand View PTA President and Rhonda Steinberg, Principal

Rhonda Steinberg
Principal
Grand View
455 24th Street
Manhattan Beach, CA 90266

It is with great professional pride that I nominate as the teacher nomination for Earth Day. Tanya is the science specialist at Grand View Elementary School in Manhattan Beach. This is her first year at the elementary level having previously taught science in a high school setting. Tanya consistently demonstrates her passion for making science an exciting subject matter for her students. Tanya has been instrumental in our schools mission of raising environmental awareness at the primary level. She leads our student run “Earth Club.” All students fully embrace the reduce, recycle and reuse concept. Tanya guides our recycling club to collect the recyclables from the classrooms once a week. Our recent Science Expo was pumped up by Tanya’s guidance in giving the students ideas in making science projects out of recyclables. Tanya has come up with week long activities for our students to participate in during Earth Week. They are making earth posters, recycling at school and at home, learning about our composter and worm bin and expanding our Trash Free Tuesdays to a trash free week. Tanya works with our PTA group, the Planet Pals in instilling environmental awareness to our students and staff. She speaks at staff meetings on tips for teachers to educate their students.

Tanya is passionate about science and the environment. She has been instrumental in teaching our students ways to become environmentally conscious. We are proud of our school’s passion and hope everyone can “Go Green with Grand View”. I hope you will consider Tanya Sanchez as the recipient of the teacher award for Earth Day. She has been an inspiration to the Grand View community.