Birthing green students

Visionary educator brings eco-curriculum and people to life

By Jennifer Anderson

Pamplin Media Group, Jun 11, 2009, Updated Oct 30, 2009

Sunnyside Environmental School principal Sarah Taylor helps third-graders design and plant a butterfly garden in front of the school.

JONATHAN HOUSE / Pamplin Media Group

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Learning about placentas, lactation and the stages of labor aren’t typical fare for middle-school curriculum, to say the least.

Then again, nothing at Southeast Portland’s Sunnyside Environmental School is typical – least of all its principal.

Sarah Taylor, a longtime educator as well as licensed midwife, paved a new frontier in education when she founded the former Environmental Middle School, the precursor to Sunnyside, in 1995.

Licensed as a midwife in 1977, she’s also delivered thousands of babies in Portland, including three of her teachers, her secretary and at least 20 current Sunnyside students.

She recalls once hearing a bunch of kindergartners playing outside of her office. “I heard a tiny voice say, ‘That principal pulled me out of my mommy’s tummy,’ ” Taylor laughs. “Then I heard other little voices say, ‘Me too!’ ‘Me too!’”

Besides her midwifery – which she’s integrated into her school curriculum with an annual Midwifery Day –Taylor, 60, is a pioneer in the “place-based education” movement which many other schools in Portland and around the country are now looking to adopt.

The idea is to take learning outside the classroom – serving meals to the homeless, taking nature walks around the neighborhood and cooking kale chips with a solar cooker, as some eighth-graders were doing one recent spring day.

Nowadays, Taylor spends much of her time preparing for the school’s transition once she retires, though she says that won’t be this year. Her big task is to put the school framework in writing so she can leave the school she created – another one of her babies – in someone else’s hands.

That’s no small task; she put everything she had into founding it 15 years ago.

The idea was simple. Along with the academic basics, give kids a lot of play time, a lot of hands-on learning in the natural elements.

The vision came to her one day while contemplating her role in life and reflecting on her upbringing as one of five siblings raised on a Pennsylvania farm.

“How do you give inner-city kids what I had?” she wondered. “The goal is to create good days for all of us . . . Every day needs to be pretty precious.”

Taylor tried to ignore the urge to start a school, but it wouldn’t go away. She and another founding teacher, Jan Zuckerman, finally approached the district, and to their surprise, then-Superintendent Jack Bierwirth “just said go ahead and start the school.”

They held an open house, and hundreds showed up.

The startup was less than organized. “There was no furniture, computers, textbooks, nothing,” she says, laughing at the memory of riding around in a pickup truck at 5 a.m. on the first day of school, picking up folding chairs and old desks to use that day.

“I was spending every minute developing curriculum,” she says.

“We’re not teaching anything crazy. We’re heavily art-focused, because that’s how you learn to see.”

For eight years, the school served just middle-schoolers, sharing space at Abernethy Elementary in Ladd’s Addition neighborhood, a mile and a half southwest.

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