168 Matt Paneitz of Long Way Home: Hero School – transforming trash into useful buildings

Guest bio

Matthew Paneitz first visited San Juan Comalapa, Guatemala, as a Peace Corps volunteer in 2002. To address the extreme poverty in the region, Matt founded the non-profit organization Long Way Home (LWH) in 2004. From 2008 to 2025, the LWH team transformed 550 tons of trash (including 35,000 used tires) into the Hero School green-built campus. Matthew documented the process at lwhomegreen.org. By spending his evenings earning a Bachelor’s degree in Sustainability and a Master’s in Education, Matt was also able to ensure that not only was the landscape transformed, but also the school’s approach to primary, middle, and high school education. Matt is currently a doctoral student in Education at Antioch University.

Long Way Home was founded to confront deeply interconnected challenges in Comalapa, Guatemala, a rural, Indigenous Maya community where 64% live in poverty and 27% in extreme poverty. The residents lack clean water, reliable sanitation, resilient homes, steady employment, and quality education. The air, water, and soil are contaminated.. To address the interconnected crises of abject poverty, poor education, and environmental degradation in Comalapa, Long Way Home launched Hero School, a project-based, community-rooted educational initiative grounded in Education for Sustainable Development. Every part of the Hero School campus, from walls made of earth-filled tires and eco bricks to glass mosaics, embodies our values of environmental stewardship, cultural pride, and resourcefulness. Our approach to education centers on empowering students to become problem-solvers in their communities. Rather than focusing on memorization, our original curriculum integrates hands-on projects into every subject. These projects include ventilated stoves to reduce respiratory infection, water tanks to store rainwater, water filters to purify water, composting latrines to reduce gastrointestinal illness, retaining walls to prevent erosion, and earthquake-resistant homes and classrooms. Through this holistic model, students graduate with more than just a diploma; they gain skills in green construction, teamwork, project planning, and civic engagement. Our teachers, all from Comalapa, undergo continuous training in sustainability and pedagogical innovation, making the entire school ecosystem a learning laboratory. We will soon share our project-based lesson plans with the public schools, and together we will fight poverty, environmental contamination, and injustice on a massive scale.