The Western New York High School Environmental Summit , scheduled for November 16, 17th 2007, will bring together six regional high schools with teams of 5-8 students and their teacher advisors to investigate an environmental challenge they face in their school or community.

The conference is being hosted at Alden Central School at its newly designed distance learning laboratory. Dave Bauer, newly retired Alden environmental science teacher and president of Sustainable Earth Solutions Inc, is delivering the training along with Christina Coyle, president of Prizm Solutions, a consulting company specializing in creative thinking strategies.

Among the sponsors is the International Center for Studies in Creativity at Buffalo State College in Buffalo, New York, an active partner providing 6 graduate students to assist in the facilitation during the conference and post conference coaching. The intent of this conference is to use creative thinking skills that will be applied to the plans of action that the teams create while attending the conference.

Prior to the conference, teachers from each of the participating schools will commit to completing an on-line teacher training and curriculum development phase to focus the teachers on the skills of creative problem solving and determine the curriculum connections for back in the classroom. After identifying each district’s environmental challenge, the district teams will provide the information and follow-up needed to solve their problems for up to two months after the seminar concludes. Not only will the summit encourage different educational entities to work together, but it also encourages businesses around the district to be involved as well by funding $500 of the registration costs of $1,000 per school team. In addition, business sponsors will provide $200 awards to the student teams after the submission of a follow-up survey that checks for sustainability in order to provide the teams the financial backing needed to get their projects started. Bauer and Coyle will provide the district teams support during the two month period after the conference. Additional sponsors include: Ecology and Environmental Inc, UB Green, and the Erie County Environmental Education Institute Inc.