By Eric Czarnik
C & G Staff Writer

BLOOMFIELD TOWNSHIP — Bloomfield Hills Schools’ superintendent is defending a new approach to environmental education from a radio talk show host who believes that it teaches anti-success attitudes.

This school year, Eastover Elementary School is beginning a “sustainability education” initiative that fuses ecology with subjects like social studies. The schoolwide instructional initiative earned unanimous approval from the Bloomfield Hills Schools board in May.

But in an August newspaper column, WJR-AM radio personality Frank Beckmann accused Eastover of joining an academic trend that has ties to the United Nations and Zero Population Growth, now called Population Connection.

Beckmann criticized a sustainability lesson example — found in an Eastover information packet — that focused on corporate profits, boycotts and workers’ rights movements. Such lessons teach students to whine about “unfairness” instead of admiring success, he argued.

“Not one school board member suggested that the wealth of Bloomfield Hills was unfairly created,” Beckmann wrote, “and not one cited any inequities that they were immediately willing to correct by surrendering their own lofty status in one of America’s most well-to-do communities.”

Bloomfield Hills Superintendent Steven Gaynor called the criticism “absurd” and said that Beckmann doesn’t live in the school district and he never contacted school officials about the issue.

“The adoption of a sustainability initiative … has nothing to do with ‘surrendering their status,’” Gaynor wrote in an e-mail. “Minimal journalistic standards would have required that he actually do some research with the folks who are the subjects about which he is writing!”

Gaynor also denied that Eastover’s program promotes class envy, zero population growth or liberal politics. “One need only look at the number of corporations with sustainability initiatives of their own to understand how wrong (Beckmann) is,” he said.

Beckmann said he had a DVD of the school board approving the initiative, and he said he stands by his column. “All the information was 100 percent accurate,” he said.

According to a school packet called “Eastover: Students for a Sustainable Future,” sustainability education teaches students how to create “a healthy environment, a fair economy, and an equitable society.”

The packet says lessons talk about topics such as land use, energy, food, resources and communities.

“The sustainability movement also seeks to democratize institutions, eliminate the exploitation of people and the environment, and achieve a more equitable distribution of resources and power,” the literature later explains.

Eastover developed the initiative with the help of two outside groups: Lawrence Technological University and an Ypsilanti nonprofit called Creative Change Educational Solutions.

Susan Santone, executive director of Creative Change, said she assisted Eastover after it contacted her in April. She said she was very frustrated that the school had to waste time responding to Beckmann’s attacks.

“He is responding from a very narrow vision of what success is,” she said. “It’s a vision of success that isn’t just about profits.”

Sustainability education is neither “feel-good, tree-hugging environmentalism” nor a fringe movement, she said. Instead, she said it is compatible with the teachings of 18th century capitalist Adam Smith.

Meanwhile, Harvard and the University of Michigan are examples of colleges that are now producing a generation of green CEOs, she said.

“They understand that a sound environment and a stable society are the basis of economic success,” she said. “This is where the world is going, and Bloomfield Hills ought to be praised … for understanding that this is a good, rigorous education.”

She also denied having any contact with Zero Population Growth, though she added that “population issues” might be appropriate for some high school courses.

While Eastover is the only Bloomfield Hills school doing the sustainability education initiative, the approach might expand “in some form” to other district schools in the future, Gaynor said.

You can reach Staff Writer Eric Czarnik at eczarnik@candgnews.com or at (586) 498-1058.