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[Note: After this item was posted, I learned that Rocky Mountain High School used less electricity than Fossil Ridge, not less energy. See this correction, provided by Dr. Jennifer Cross of Colorado State University.]
How does a 30-year-old high school built before the era of “green” buildings beat the pants off of a new LEED-certified high school six and one-half miles across town when it comes to saving energy?
Officials of the Poudre School District in Fort Collins found themselves asking that question a couple years ago after they reviewed the energy use at their schools.
Conservation is a priority within the district and district officials were understandably pleased to discover their schools reduced natural gas consumption by an average of 25 percent and electricity use by an average of 33 percent between July 2007 and June 2008.
But what really caught their eye was that Rocky Mountain High School, built in 1974, cut its energy consumption by 50 percent. As a result, it was using less energy per square foot than Fossil Ridge High School, heralded as one of the first LEED-certified high schools in the United States when it opened in 2005.
LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) certification is a green-building rating system developed a dozen years ago to measure buildings on a variety of criteria, including energy conservation. Everything else being equal, Fossil Ridge should use 20 to 30 percent less energy per square foot than the older school. But Rocky was the school using less energy.
Nobody knew how they did it
How did Rocky do it? Nobody knew.
So, Jennifer Cross, an assistant professor of sociology at Colorado State University, was asked to figure it out.With the help of one of her graduate students, Cross determined that most of the difference came down to leadership and the school’s own culture of conservation.
The leadership started with Tom Lopez, Rocky’s principal for the past seven years. He became interested in conservation while serving as the school’s assistant principal and convinced his boss to have an energy audit done at the school. “From the energy audit results, it was easy to start looking at ways to reduce energy consumption,” Lopez says.
Once he became principal, Lopez began working in earnest to change the school’s culture -- they call it The Lobo Way at the school -- around conservation.
“I’m not a rules kind of guy,” Lopez says. “I believe it’s in our DNA to do the right thing.” The right thing in this case was finding ways to use less energy.
Lopez began enlisting champions for the cause. Science teacher Dave Swartz was one. He helped get students involved. And Lopez took the unusual step of adding head custodian Brian Elshof to the school’s site-management team, giving him an opportunity help shape policy -- something custodians don’t usually get to do.
Elshof and his newly empowered custodial staff began spearheading changes of their own.
An example: For years, the custodians had turned all the lights on when they showed up for work at 6 a.m. But the teachers didn’t start arriving until 7:30. So, the custodians quit turning on the lights when they got to work. They told the teachers to turn on the lights in their classrooms when they got there -- and to turn them off when they left. Teachers who didn’t turn off their lights got friendly reminders.
Elshof and his staff also noticed that the gym teachers turned on all the lights in the gym even on days when they knew the students would be going outside. So, the custodians suggested the teachers leave the lights off on those days.
How much difference did Lopez and his team make? A lot.
The school district’s operations staff made district-wide changes to the schools’ heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC) systems. The energy savings at Rocky from the HVAC change was comparable to what happened at other schools around the district, Cross says.
Behavior and culture change
The real differences at Rocky were behavior and culture change, Cross says.
For example, Cross says, during interviews at Poudre High School, which didn’t make any changes except those done at the district level, she heard “a lot of stories about what wasn’t happening and what people would like to see happen or wished would happen. Not surprisingly, at Rocky those things were described as being present.”
“We can teach people behaviors,” Lopez says. “Success is about how palatable you make those behaviors.”
Once word got out about the success at Rocky, Lopez was invited to speak to leaders of another school district about what the school had done.
“Their superintendent asked me how they could duplicate it,” Lopez says. “I said I don’t know. What’s the belief system of your school system and your principals?”
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