You’ve got to love public schools sometimes. In some of the direst situations, some rather smart solutions are created.

It’s been the same sad story throughout my public education in Santa Barbara. My second-grade class met in a smelly, leaky portable. There were too many kids enrolled at the school to fit them all into the permanent buildings.

We heard promises for improvements and renovations, but school officials had probably been saying that since some of their own teachers were in the second grade.

In high school, my freshman Geometry class was so packed that students were sitting in chairs taken from the next classroom. People also sat on the counters and at the teacher’s desk. Additionally, the classroom leaked and the chairs broke if you sat in them wrong. Not to mention, finding rodent droppings in the computer keyboards was commonplace.

It’s really no different at City College.

Schools seem to be low on the list of priorities in the state budget. Thanks to the credit crunch and budget bungle that the state – and the rest of the world – is caught up in, every expense by every department is under the cost-cutting microscope.

For example, students are more frequently required to download the class handouts and print them out at their own expense. Like money grows on the same trees that paper is made from.

But this practice meets a practical reality. Perhaps this type of cutting back in the name of cost cutting is beneficial. Not to students, but to the environment.

Think about it. Instructors are finally refraining from distributing a seemingly endless array of one-sided handouts, which stack up pretty high by the end of the semester. Instead, more and more are insisting we log onto Pipeline (insert shudder here) and look at the assignment on our own.

It’s really brilliant once you realize that most of the time you don’t need to waste even your own paper, because there’s nothing worth printing out in the first place.

It’s accidental environmentalism, which is the last thing I would have imagined unfolding in the middle of economic pandemonium. And yet it makes perfect sense.

Who has the money to waste resources that should not be wasted in the first place? After this realization, suddenly the cafeteria’s takeout container surcharge policy doesn’t annoy me as much.

Perhaps simple convenience was stopping the masses from being more environmentally friendly.

It was too easy not to employ a reusable bottle for drinking water, because you could buy a cheap bottle of Aquafina. Those of us short on cash are now thinking twice before choosing convenience over environmental consciousness.

Granted, I’m not exactly rushing out to get a Nalgene bottle to decorate with stickers. Yet the practices of reducing and reusing make more sense now, even if it may have been inadvertent. And there’s nothing wrong with that.

You may label me a liberal environmentalist, but in this case I don’t see a problem with saving trees and money at the same time.