SUNY New Paltz achieves STARS Silver Rating, announces spring meet-up series
SUNY New Paltz has joined an exclusive list of fewer than 350 higher education institutions that have earned recognition from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE). The College was granted a Silver Rating from the AASHE’s Sustainability Tracking, Assessment & Rating System (STARS) this March.
“Filing a report with STARS has been a priority of the Office of Campus Sustainability (OCS),” said Lisa Mitten, campus sustainability coordinator. “Compiling this data gives us a starting point and allows us to track our performance over time and to compare ourselves to other institutions. It also creates momentum. We’re silver now; the next question is, how do we get to gold?”
The OCS aims to capitalize on that momentum with a new sustainability meet-up series that will begin this spring with a Rail Trail Bike Excursion, Friday, May 15 at 4 p.m. Registration is required for participation in this event. Bikers will meet at the traffic circle at Old Main before departing at 4:15 p.m. for the 5.5. mile trip to the Rail Trail Cafe. Organizers expect to be back on campus by 7 p.m.
Additional sustainability meet-up events are being planned for the fall semester.
Information about the STARS Silver Rating and information about the Sustainability Seed Fund are available at the Office of Campus Sustainability website.
To read the STARS report for SUNY New Paltz, including our score in each of the rubric’s credit categories, follow this link.
About STARS
With more than 650 participants on six continents, AASHE’s STARS program is the most widely recognized framework in the world for publicly reporting comprehensive information related to a college or university’s sustainability performance. The system is designed to enable meaningful comparisons over time and across institutions by using a common set of measurements developed with broad participation from the international campus sustainability community.
More information about the AASHE and STARS is available online.