Activist Teacher Develops Plan to Conserve Energy, Water at Schools : Education: Larry Brim worked with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to develop a handbook that instructors and students can use.

In the late 1960s, Larry Brim was inspired by news stories about a mysterious environmental activist in northern Illinois who for years dumped dead fish in the offices of industries that polluted the Fox River.

Brim, a science teacher at Irving Junior High in Atwater Village, still holds the activist, who was never identified, in high regard. And while his methods may not be as radical, Brim has designed a curriculum for Los Angeles schools that he hopes is just as successful in sparking passion about conservation.

Through a privately funded fellowship, Brim worked this summer with the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power to develop a handbook for schools on saving water and energy.

The book offers 11 lessons on conservation that teachers can use in their science and math courses, and tells how instructors can request speakers and plan field trips to enhance the curriculum.

It also encourages art and writing contests and student assemblies, plays and debates about conservation. And its main feature, according to Brim, is a series of checklists that students can use to audit water and energy use at their schools.

If administrators cooperate, students can learn to read meters, test school pipes and sinks for leaks, survey campus landscaping and design programs for recycling--all in an effort to make schools more efficient and energy-conscious.

“The idea is for schools to save water and energy. A lot of times schools are saving, but up to now there hasn’t been a systematic way” to conserve, Brim said.

Brim, 44, spent more than six weeks at the DWP’s Hope Street headquarters, learning about low-energy lighting, meter reading and low-flow shower heads, and teaching utility officials how water conservation can best be taught to students and administrators.

He was one of 35 fellows of the Industry Initiatives for Science and Math Education, which places teachers in businesses or industries as interns who then implement what they learned in their classrooms. The program is funded by the Los Angeles Educational Partnership, a group that recruits private sector funds for public education projects.

“We’re in a crisis mode and the fourth year of a drought,” Walter Zeisl, supervisor of educational services for the DWP, said of the fellowship program. “This is a year that we’ve got to have a special emphasis on conservation, especially in the schools.”

Developing multidisciplinary courses is nothing new to Brim, a science teacher with a master’s degree in history and a passion for philosophy. After serving as a Peace Corps volunteer in Liberia in the late 1960s, he returned to the West African country in 1976 as a science curriculum specialist.

Ten years later, Brim won a small grant to develop a course that uses art to teach the history of science. Today, another grant is helping Brim create a lesson that will blend philosophy, ecology and science. In that course, students will study the trials of Socrates, Galileo and John Scopes, and will write and produce a scenario in which earth is put on trial for committing “crimes,” such as earthquakes, against man.

“I’m interested in the big questions, such as, ‘What is man’s role in nature?’ ” Brim said. “But it’s a real challenge to interest students in those. What you can interest them in is things that affect them immediately and directly. If they learn to read meters at school, they can read them at home, and perhaps save their families some money.”

The DWP will distribute in October several copies of the handbook to all public and private schools in Los Angeles, and Brim said he already has scheduled student field trips to DWP facilities and begun incorporating ecology lessons into his science curriculum.

But getting teachers and administrators interested in the handbook may be another challenge, he said.

The book suggests that a staff member be appointed at each school to oversee the use of an energy conservation curriculum. But Brim acknowledged that most teachers may not have time to assume that role or develop special classroom projects on conservation.

So he is counting on financial incentives, among other things, to spark interest. The Los Angeles Unified School District’s own Energy Incentive Program gives money to schools that reduce their water, gas and electricity use by at least 10%. And the DWP will provide water bottles and decal stickers to public and private schools that use Brim’s handbook.

“This can be helpful to save the environment,” Brim said. “My feeling is that we can do something, and this is one small step.”