Pine Jog Elementary School

FAU and the SDPBC pioneered a new direction for high performance schools in Florida. The entire 150-acre parcel serves as an outdoor classroom and the two adjacent facilities share numerous site, building system synergies and design features. FAU offered built environmental education courses through its College of Education using both facilities as student teaching sites. The site education curriculum utilizes the entire preserve with designed learning places in and around the structures that bring the outdoors inside and vice versa. These opportunities include butterfly gardens, water re-use demonstration areas, understanding solar paths and energy through the creation of an interactive sun dial area and “Solar Plaza”, mitigation/restoration areas for older students to create themselves, and biological life cycle study areas of slash pines, gopher tortoises, native grasses, insects, lizards, and other native amphibians.