November/December 2009

Best Practice Guide

K-12 Sustainable Operations Best Practice Guide: Where the Stakes are High and the Fruit Hangs Low

By Ben Stanley, YRG Sustainability

We can all feel it, green schools have arrived. All across the country, efforts to promote green schools are popping up from the US Green Building Council’s Mayors Alliance for Green Schools, to Colorado’s Governor’s Energy Office partnership on the Colorado Collaborative for High Performance Schools Criteria. In fact, one green schools website, www.projectgreenschools.org, links to over 80 related organizations, government agencies, and advocacy groups ranging from the venerable celebrity of leisurely reading, ASHRAE, to more kid friendly and upbeat Eco Savvy Kid and Green Squad. Yet, with all these resources available there are very few that focus on providing guidance for the holistic application of sustainable operations in K-12 schools. One can imagine that consequently, our existing schools must be feeling rather left out.

This is the context that I found myself in April of 2008 while trying to develop a topic for my dreadfully delinquent master’s thesis at Colorado State University’s college of construction management. At this same time it was suggested to me that perhaps there was not a great resource out there for sustainable operations in schools and that perhaps it should be my thesis topic. So I began to investigate and found that there was no shortage of information related to the various facets of sustainable operations but that there was a need to distill the information into one resource that put it all together. A year and a half later and with help the from the USGBC-CO’s Green Schools Advocacy Committee and Bill Franzen the former Executive Director of Operations at Poudre School District, I have completed the guide and it is available for free for any school, educator, facility manager, or administer to use.

So what’s in this thing and how is it useful?

The guide compiles a listing of best practices for sustainable operations in K-12 schools that serve to establish clear strategies for sustainable operations. The real value of this guide is in its attempt to distill the most salient best practices, appropriate metrics, and program specific resources into a digestible best practice guide. To that end, it is not a smattering of my own ideas but rather it is a compilation of best practices from related programs. These programs include Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) and the Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS) as well as  governmental agencies and non-profits like the Environmental Protection Agency, California Integrated Waste Management Board and organizations dedicated to healthy schools, green schools, and education.

Nine independent sections related to sustainable operations in schools are included in the guide and cover the following:

Section 1: Building Exterior, Landscape, and Pest Management
Section 2: Alternative Transportation     
Section 3: Indoor and Landscape Water Efficiency and Measurement
Section 4: Green House Gas Footprinting
Section 5: Energy Assessment and Improvement
Section 6: Existing Building Commissioning
Section 7: Sustainable Procurement
Section 8: Solid Waste Management|
Section 9: Green Cleaning

 

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CBG /November/December 2009