Go Green

Friday’s symposium opened with a presentation from Rachel Gutter of the U.S. Green Building Council  on the Go Green Initiative. She began by defining a “green school” as one that “creates a healthy environment, conducive to learning, while saving energy, resources and money”. This will sound familiar to anyone who heard last August’s presentation by John Boecker of the 7group.

Among her other points:

• Schools should be statements of the community's commitment to the environment.
• Building design should make it easy for the occupants to “act green."
• Just as today’s students are thought to be “digital natives” they are also “sustainability natives”; our children are growing up with a commitment to the environment that didn’t exist a generation ago.
• An important aspect of sustainability is durability. We should be asking "how many generations should a school last?" instead of "how many years?"

 In response to a question about making parking lots green, there was the suggestion (perhaps not entirely practical in State College) that the lot could be covered with solar panels. Perhaps easier to implement: preferred parking for gas-efficient vehicles.

By the way: afterwards, I shared with her the link to the State College “Board Resolution on Sustainability”. She later told me, “this is the best district green schools resolution I have ever seen, hands down.”

Among the recent developments on LEED certification, the twenty categories by which projects are measured are now weighted according to their relative impact on the environment, with regional climate variations taken into consideration. There are also new standards for renovations to existing buildings that recognize the tradeoff between the environmental options that are available with new construction versus the impact on the environment that comes from the manufacture of all new materials and the disposal of demolition waste.

The symposium concluded with several presentations that addressed opportunities of integrating the physical facility with academic curriculum.

As a salesman for Lucent (a lighting controls company), several years ago Steve Beede attended a school demonstration expecting to see how the newly installed system was saving the school energy and money. Instead, he saw a demonstration of innovative teaching: a science teacher with a hand-held device who could show her class, in real-time, the impact of opening and closing the blinds on energy consumption. (Adjusting the blinds automatically adjusted the lights.) He immediately redirected his career to the development of school energy curriculum. The video is worth watching. 

Trung Le expounded on this idea of school buildings becoming the Third Teacher. Entire curriculum based on this premise now exist, some of which can be found at Greenovations.