The notion of 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. According to Kristen Heinen, assistant director of the Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS), the idea of green building was unknown to most educators. However, 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 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. This article discusses the benefits of green schools and their impact on students' health and the environment.

GOING GREEN:

AT first glance, the most striking aspect of Inderkum High School in northwest Sacramento, may be the glass. 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.
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 parking lot, lie 500 wells with more than 20 miles of piping connecting them to each other and the school: Inderkum's heating and cooling system.
The wells are 275 feet deep. At that depth, the ground temperature is a constant 65°F. By repeatedly circulating water between the wells and the school, facility engineers can warm classrooms in the winter, cool them in the summer.
The geothermal arrangement cost 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 with 8 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 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 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), 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.

GROWING AWARENESS:

"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 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."
The arguments for green schools are abundant and compelling. In a much-cited 2006 report called "Greening America's Schools," Kats laid out some of the objections to and rationales for green schools. One year earlier, a survey of senior school leaders 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 funding. 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 found they cost around $3 per square foot more to build — only about 2% 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% less energy and 32% less water than conventionally designed schools. A 2006 study by the U.S. Green Building Council 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 — which is 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. California's Green Schools Initiative contends that half of the nation's schools have problems linked to poor air quality and other environmental hazards.
Green schools are an antidote. 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% in green buildings with improved air quality.
Beyond that, students in green schools' healthier environments learn better, advocates say, citing improved test scores.
"There's a kind of threshold point where that perception changes," Kats says. "Three years ago, there were not a lot of successful models of green schools in operation. 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 are blossoming everywhere, especially in California. That may be due at least in part to CHPS's 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.
A key to the CHPS approach is its required integration of the myriad interests involved in building a new school. "Practicing integrated design involves bringing together all school stakeholders in planning, designing, constructing, and operating the school," said Heinen, CHPS's assistant director. "The most successful 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. Still, initial cost daunts many school districts and boards.
School districts must sometimes be imaginative. For example, when the Poway Unified School District, northeast of San Diego, set about building a new elementary school a few years ago, it envisioned placing energy-saving photovoltaic cells on the campus's roofs. But instead of placing the solar panels on the roofs, which required additional expenses and a longer review period by state authorities, Poway officials 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 the district's director of facilities.