Going green: Environmentally friendly schools pay off

At first glance, the most striking aspect of Inderkum High School, part of the fast-growing Natomas Unified School District in northwest Sacramento, may be the glass. There’s a lot of it. Windows sheathe most of the school, culminating in a towering, curving reflective wall of glass that marks the central atrium and establishes the school’s architectural identity.

There are so many windows at Inderkum, it’s said, that only the place where you aren’t swathed in natural sunlight is the school theater’s control booth.

But if you really want to see what distinguishes Inderkum from almost every other high school in the state and country, you need to dig deeper. Literally. Outside, beneath the cars and asphalt of Inderkum’s parking lot, lie 500 wells with more than 20 miles of piping connecting them to each other and the school.

This is Inderkum’s heating and cooling system.

The wells are 275 feet deep. At that depth, the ground temperature is a constant 65 degrees Fahrenheit. By repeatedly circulating water between the wells and the school (about 100 times a day), facility engineers can warm classrooms in the winter, cool them in the summer.

The geothermal arrangement wasn’t cheap, costing perhaps 1-½ times more to install than an equivalent electric-and-gas heating, ventilation and air conditioning system. But it will last much longer—an estimated 50 years, compared to eight to 15 years for a traditional system.

“And the energy source is basically free,” school board President Ron Dwyer-Voss points out. “We’re just tapping into the temperature of the Earth.”

Inderkum, named after the farming family that previously owned the property, opened its doors in 2004. Shiny, mirrored appearance aside, it represents a new and rapidly emerging kind of campus: “a green school.”

The notion of green schools—campuses that are energy-efficient and ecologically friendly, and that provide a healthy, productive, comfortable environment for students and staff—has been around for some time. But for many educators, green schools have remained more good intention than proven approach, a huge risk that few school leaders could—or would—take.

“I don’t think anybody is against building healthier, more efficient schools,” says Gregory Kats, managing director of Good Energies, a venture capital firm that invests in the renewable energy industry. “The problem is the real world. Districts have finite, sometimes shrinking budgets. They’ve built schools a certain way for a long time, and there’s a real learning curve when a district tries to go green. There are transition costs, new processes and questions. It’s much more complicated, more sophisticated. It can be kind of scary.”

Time and necessity, though, change everything.

“A year ago, I would have said the idea of green building was unknown to most educators,” says Kristen Heinen, assistant director of the Collaborative for High Performance Schools. CHPS is a consortium of more than 150 California businesses, government agencies, school districts and public interest groups on a mission to promote the design, construction and operation of schools that improve learning while saving energy, resources and money.

“However,” continues Heinen, “public awareness and interest have grown significantly due to education campaigns on specific environmental problems such as climate change, children’s health, water quality and electronic waste. These issues hit home for parents, students, teachers and school administrators who spend a significant amount of time in school buildings that contribute to these problems.

“Over the past year, CHPS has seen a steady increase in school districts that incorporate green building practices due to a greater awareness of buildings’ impact on children’s health and the environment, and also because green schools have proven to be financially beneficial to districts,” Heinen says.

The arguments for green schools are abundant and compelling. In a much-cited 2006 report called “Greening America’s Schools,” Kats—of the venture capital firm—laid out some of the objections to and rationales for green schools. One year earlier, he noted, a survey of senior school leaders had reported that most were generally discouraged from undertaking green construction because of concerns about cost, as well as a lack of awareness of the benefits and difficulties in finding sufficient funding for projects. But Kats says none of these concerns stand up to serious scrutiny.

First and foremost, green schools aren’t appreciably more expensive to build than conventional schools. A national review of 30 functional green schools, for example, found they cost around $3 per square foot more to build—only about 2 percent more than conventional campuses.

And the benefits of green are many times greater.

“The financial savings are about $70 per square foot, 20 times as high as the cost of going green,” according to Kats.

Green schools typically use 33 percent less energy and 32 percent less water than conventionally designed schools, he says, and a 2006 study by the U.S. Green Building Council bears him out. It reported that green construction saves the average school $100,000 each year in energy costs alone—enough to hire two new, full-time teachers, or to purchase 5,000 textbooks or 500 computers.

Healthy dividends

The bigger payoff may be the salutary effect upon students and staff.

Counting students, teachers, administrators, nurses, janitors and others, it’s estimated that one American in five spends his or her weekdays in a K–12 school. Unfortunately, that’s not always the healthiest environment. With one student in 10 suffering from asthma, the American Lung Association estimates more than 14 million school days are missed each year by students whose asthma is exacerbated by poor indoor air quality. The Green Schools Initiative, a California advocacy group based in the San Francisco Bay Area, contends that half of the nation’s schools have problems linked to poor air quality and other environmental hazards.

Green schools are an antidote, say Kats and others. Various analyses suggest environmentally friendly schools have lower student absenteeism and higher teacher retention. An American Institute of Architects review of five studies, for example, found an average asthma reduction of 38.5 percent in green buildings with improved air quality. Teachers missed 1.41 fewer working days—a 12 percent improvement over time lost to faculty illness in traditional schools.

Beyond that, students in green schools’ healthier environments learn better, advocates say, citing improved test scores.

Like many things, it’s all about perceived risks and benefits, according to Kats.

“There’s a kind of threshold point where that perception changes,” the venture capital firm’s director says. “Three years ago, there were not a lot of successful models of green schools in operation. Now there are, with hundreds more being built. The perception that green schools are risky is going away. Now the perceived risk is about not building green.”

“Indeed, there’s a real risk of building conventional—of building a school that is energy inefficient, unhealthy and obsolete, a facility that does not optimize the learning environment, where kids do not thrive, damages them, the school and the district.”

Making it happen

Green schools like Natomas USD’s Inderkum are blossoming everywhere, especially in California. That may be due at least in part to CHPS’ advocacy. The consortium dedicated to environmentally smart academic settings that are hospitable to learning has established rigorous construction criteria for green schools, with standards that emphasize health, comfort, energy efficiency, resource conservation, personal safety, and cost-effective operations and maintenance. CHPS also runs a rating program and publishes best-practices
manuals. These efforts have been copied by other states.

“California is out in front,” recognizes Deane Evans, a research professor at the New Jersey Institute of Technology and the executive director of the Center for Architecture and Building Science Research. “And CHPS is the brain trust of the whole effort.”

A key to the CHPS approach is its required integration of the myriad interests involved in creating and building a new school. “Practicing integrated design involves bringing together all school stakeholders in planning, designing, constructing and operating the school,” said Heinen, CHPS’ assistant director. “The most successful CHPS projects have started by incorporating CHPS into the conversation in the initial planning stages of the project, and have begun with a kick-off meeting including the engineers, architects, facility managers, custodians, landscape designers, teachers, parents, administrators, manufacturers and even students, to talk about priority areas such as health, energy or waste and how each stakeholder will be impacted or expected to contribute.”

At least 26 California school districts have adopted CHPS criteria as official policy. Los Angeles Unified School District—the state’s largest—was the first, in 2003. LAUSD has now embarked on the largest public school construction program in U.S. history: a $19.2 billion program to build or modernize 285 projects, including building 150 new schools.

“All of the new buildings are and will be green,” says Rob Gard, LAUSD’s senior communications manager. “The upfront costs of going green are anywhere from zero to 5 percent more, but the energy savings alone is 30 to 40 percent each year for schools designed to CHPS standards. Over 50 to 75 years, that initial cost is completely mitigated.”

Still, it is that initial cost that daunts many school districts and boards.

“School construction monies are so tightly regulated and limited right now that many school districts would probably have to go deep into debt if they wanted to pursue some of the aspects of green construction,” concedes Kerry Clegg, an 18-year veteran of the Sulphur Springs Union Elementary School District board in Los Angeles County. A former president of CSBA, Clegg has worked on state task forces on both school facilities and construction management.

“The state, which is the primary construction funding source, still considers things like solar panels to be amenities, not a necessity or a requirement. Trustees trying to build a new school are looking for the most bang for their buck. They have a limited amount of money to work with, and often they have to go with short-term solutions just because that gets them more now, when they need it most,” Clegg points out.

He and others say state agencies need to boost funding and incentives for going green. In the meantime, school districts must be persistent—and imaginative.

Consider the case of Poway Unified, a 33,000-student district northeast of San Diego. When the district set about building a new elementary school a few years ago, it envisioned placing energy-saving photovoltaic cells on the campus’s roofs. (That’s similar to a much larger effort in the nearby San Diego Unified School District, which is in the process of installing solar roofs on 24 schools. San Diego Unified officials estimate the 2.5 million square feet of solar roofing will eventually produce 10,450 megawatts of electricity annually and save the district $37 million in roof replacement, maintenance and energy costs.)

Then Poway officials got creative. Instead of placing the solar panels on the roofs, which required additional expenses and a longer review period by state authorities, they realized they could erect the solar array on an appropriately situated slope adjacent to the school site. Doing so was cheaper, faster and just as effective, according to Doug Mann, the district’s executive director of facilities.

Lights off, and other bright ideas

Efforts like those in Natomas and Poway grab attention, but there are plenty of other effective, if less dramatic, ways to turn a school a brighter shade of green.

“In the 1960s, you’d turn on a light in a classroom and leave it on all day,” LAUSD’s Gard says. “Now we use automatic sensors that monitor movement. If there’s nobody in the room, the lights turn off.”

Administrators at Manteca Unified School District, in the San Joaquin Valley, simply turn off the lights at night, when schools are empty. “Some people were worried that dark campuses would attract more vandalism, but that hasn’t happened,” reports Nell Miller, a manager in the district’s maintenance department.

“If you have a school district with facility people who are enlightened and turned on and excited about [green schools], if you can get principals and school boards interested in using sustainability as a learning tool, if the community gets involved, then green schools can become the real deal,” says Charles Linn, an editor for Architectural Record.

At the moment, the green school movement is growing, swelling with more advocates and exemplary campuses. Will it last? That’s hard to know, admits Evans, the New Jersey Institute of Technology research professor. But the days of relatively cheap energy are gone. Links between the environment and health and learning are firmly established and impossible to ignore. There are a lot of reasons why green is here
to stay.

Still, the future has a way of being unpredictable, and what defines good school design and function today may be irrelevant to the next generation of school leaders.

“I’m pretty sure that 20 years from now, the concept of a school will be much different,” Evans says. A 1992 Architectural Record textbook on school design, for example, didn’t even mention the word “Internet.” Now, most classrooms are wired for the Web—and soon they may be wireless.

“Schools are continuing to shift and adapt to changes in society. They connect and relate to each other differently than in the past,”
Evans adds.

“In the future, school buildings will undoubtedly look and behave differently than they do now, but the real change will be more profound. It will be in how we answer the question: “What is
a school?”

Scott LaFee is a contributing writer for California Schools.