Escuela Técnica N°8 Paula Albarracín de Sarmiento

Empowering students to build upon the past into a greener future

Escuela Técnica N°8 Paula Albarracín de Sarmiento, a state school in Buenos Aires City, Argentina sits next to “Olimpo”, a site that was once a clandestine detention centre used by the former military government in Argentina. The school is reclaiming this once-feared site and reconnecting it with the community, creating life where before there used to be only death through a community garden and a memorial telling the stories of the victims.

This is one of a number of environmental and social projects run by the school, which specialises in providing an education where the social and chemical sciences coexist. Most of its students come from lower income backgrounds and live in settlements where there is poor access to clean drinking water, healthy food and heating.

The school has helped address some of these issues through the Green Schools Programme initiated by the Ministry of Education of Buenos Aires City Government. Leading the work through a network of schools of the community, it has developed projects to study the nutritional and environmental benefits of solar cookers and ovens. The school set up an organic community garden and, in 2017, chemistry students began to make their own hydroponic nutrients that eventually led the school to become a supplier for more than 50 schools and community institutions, contributing to the development of different community gardens in small spaces in the city. A year later, students developed aquaponic crops as an alternative to organic farming.

If Escuela Técnica N°8 Paula Albarracín de Sarmiento were to win the World’s Best School Prize for Environmental Action, it would use the funds to continue to support its programmes, buy more supplies and build a laboratory. It would also use the money to install a fish hatchery and grant funding for lower income students to go on school trips.