Wiggling

At this point, I have gathered a great deal of data and ideas about going green with educational facilities. I have found that a great deal of the information and ideas seem to be dreamworld ideas. For example, it would be wonderful to heat my schools using solely solar panels, but the reality is that A)we live in Minnesota and the amount of solar energy to heat the buildings would be hard to gather and B)the cost to convert our heating systems to solar would be a difficult investment to sell to a school board.

Another topic I am finding a lot about is energy conservation and management. I have been able to evalutate this idea using hard data from our school district. We began our energy management program began in 2004, and to date we have saved over 1.4 million dollars in energy. We have done that by diligently reminding staff to work on the energy saving strategies. We also employ an energy manager in our district, and his salary has paid for itself many times over with the money we have saved.

Next, I was able to explore another idea to help our district become more evironmentally friendly, and that is to gradually transform our heating systems to geothermal heat. All buildings are currently run with boilers except our high school, which is heated geothermally. I was able to view the cost analysis, and the emission reports from each of the schools. Our high school produces less emissions than the the other schools, and the heating system costs less to operate on an ongoing basis. However, due to the higher cost of installing this system, it took approximately ten years to break even when comparing higher cost of installation and savings of operation. This is still an exciting idea to look into however, as all of the boilers in our buildings are old and need a great deal of annual maintenance. Several of them will need replacements in the next ten years. Therefore, when investing for the long term future of the district, I am wondering if it will make sense to begin replacing them with a geothermal system. This is a great possibility, one that I think over time will be likely option.

Finally, the last option I have explored that might be a good possibility is a more aggressive recycling system in our district. Currently, we recycle paper and aluminum, but it is not enforced aggressively and the culture is not that of recycling. Teachers and staff tend to do a nice job of this, but student struggle. I have looked into the option of teaching a recycling unit to kindergartners and first graders, and the cost of this unit is almost zero if I am willing to put in some time to prepare the materials.

On another note, I am very excited about an efficiency study that is being done right now for the district. A company that we buy supplies from is looking into our cleaning process and developing an analysis of how many man hours each building should take to clean and maintain. This should help me reallocate resources if needed, and lead to cost savings and efficiency. I'm hoping that this savings will help free up budget for me to try some of these green ideas with my buildings.