We're thrilled to share some big news: on June 4, 2026, The Grow Co-op officially earned the Eco-Schools USA Green Flag Award from the National Wildlife Federation — and we did it in our very first year.
Our official Green Flag certification seal from the National Wildlife Federation.
If you're not familiar with the program: Eco-Schools USA has four certification levels — Bronze, Silver, Gold, and Green Flag. Green Flag is the top of the ladder, reserved for schools that don't just talk about sustainability but embed it across their whole program — curriculum, campus, and community. Most schools take multiple years to work their way up to it. Ours got there in one.
That's not a credit to the adults. It's a credit to the kids.
Our students ran a full environmental audit of our campus, identified real action steps, and then did the work: a native pollinator garden, a campus-wide recycling and composting program, a bird survey with habitat improvements, and nature-based mindfulness practices. They wrote our Eco Code themselves. They elected their own co-presidents and vice-president to lead the effort. They submitted the formal action plan to NWF themselves. This was never a unit we taught — it was a program they led.
What the reviewers saw
Certification included a virtual site visit, where members of our student action team spoke directly with the Eco-Schools U.S. review team about their projects. In their feedback, NWF highlighted our students' whole-school engagement — hands-on projects like the pollinator garden and recycling program, real critical thinking and engineering design work, and the STEAM connections woven through it all. They also called out our focus on social-emotional learning: kindness, inclusion, and mindfulness as part of environmental stewardship, not separate from it.
Why this matters to us
Eco-education has been part of Grow's identity since day one, and Green Flag is external, independent confirmation of something we already believed: when you give kids real responsibility for real places, they rise to meet it. Every family who trusted us with their child this year helped make this happen.
We're not stopping here. NWF pointed us toward deeper community partnerships for next year — including local groups doing bird-habitat and Florida Scrub-Jay conservation work — and we're already planning how to build those in.
Want the fuller story — the Eco Code, the projects, what's coming next in our Thursday Enrichment program? Read more in our post on eco-education at Grow.
“The students led it.”
— The Grow Co-op Team