America's Top 10 Green Schools

By Jane Holtz Kay, The Green Guide. Posted August 25, 2005.

The early-American school kids swaddled with scarves to within a breath of suffocating as they hiked to the little red school house didn't know that their classrooms suffered from faulty insulation and bad air. But that's because no one thought much about the coal fire's smoke, the oil lantern's lung-clogging potential, the dank air's capacity to promote mildew and molds, or the contaminated water from the well.

That was then: before "green" and "sustainable" were "invented." And now? Looking at such nods to urban ecology as Manhattan's green-roofed Calhoun school, we see a sample of the neighborhood classrooms' new sustainability and a sign that we know -- and do better -- now. Or at least some of us do, like the state of Washington, which last spring took the lead in insisting that all school and public buildings go green, i.e. adopt LEED standards as rated by the U.S. Green Building Council.

To be sure, the sustainability experts can list and act on everything from toxic cleaning products to off-gassing materials; from pesticides and bad air that exacerbate asthma within to PCBs from old caulk without. And yet, the Green Schools Initiative, a multi-school effort to make schools healthier and more ecologically sustainable, found that the classrooms in half of America's 115,000 schools suffer from poor indoor environments. And even the school's surroundings can be hazardous: A study published in the Journal of the American Medical Association this July showed that pesticide spraying near schools has made children acutely ill, causing vomiting, wheezing and conjunctivitis. And, as others assuredly know, the indoor air and clean-up chemicals can do the same.

The Criteria

Herein, then, searching for better schools with better environments, we looked to the U.S. Green Building Council's Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) standards, as well as a number of our own insights and impressions, to come up with criteria by which we measured our green school picks:

A. Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) Green Building standards:

1. Sustainable Siting -- site selection, alternative transportation, stormwater management, urban redevelopment
2. Water Efficiency -- water efficient landscaping, water use reduction, innovative waste water use
3. Energy & Atmosphere -- CFC reductions, renewable energy, reduced energy consumption, green power, reducing ozone
4. Materials and Resources -- building and resource reuse, local materials, recycled content, certified wood
5. Indoor Environmental Quality -- indoor air quality, CO2, ventilation, low-volatile organic compound (VOC) materials, thermal comfort, daylighting
6. Innovation in Design

B. Healthy School Lunches: Does the school serve organic and/or locally-grown food for school lunches?

C. School-wide Green Initiatives: Does the school have a recycling program, carpool incentives, or any other initiatives that show that the school is taking action to be pro-environment?

D. Green Education: Is there an environmental curriculum?

E. School Procurement Policies: Does the school use recycled paper, organic cotton for sports uniforms, low-energy computers or other green products?

F. Contaminants:

1. Does it use integrated pest management (non-toxic methods to deprive bugs of food, water and entry) to avoid exposing children to dangerous pesticides?
2. Does it have wooden playground equipment treated with arsenic?
3. Does it use "green" cleaning materials, such as cleansers that do not release hazardous chemicals?
4. Has the school checked for lead paint problems or high lead levels in water?

G. School Green Spaces:

1. Does the school have green spaces or gardens that students are part of, and do the students participate in greening their school?
2. Does its landscaping including native plants (which also reduce the need for pesticides)?

Citing The Schools

While no school scored straight A's in all these criteria, we found ten that covered the field beyond our early expectations. Still, green schools can't rest on their laurels and solving some problems can lead to others. Spanking new schools in the outburbs may, unfortunately, preclude walking, shuttling students on long bus rides to distant buildings. "Because of transit access, even the oldest, most decrepit school in New York City probably has a smaller ecological footprint than the 'greenest' new school in the suburbs," says environmental economist Charles Komanoff of Komanoff Energy Associates (KEA), a New York energy consulting firm.

Happily, as green schools grow in number, they have begun to offer the proof in the pudding (or in the organic oatmeal) that with improved ventilation, better thermal control and enhanced natural lighting, students do better when tested academically.

The following then are our picks and prizes:

1. Two-handed Round of Clapping for Clackamas

The award-winning Clackamas High School in Oregon managed to earn a silver LEED citation for its 265,000-square foot green building on a 41-acre site in Oregon's kingdom of green. Linking architectural intentions to Amory Lovins' Rocky Mountain Institute, which deals with complex, energy-efficient systems, Boora Architects secured a 44 percent reduction in energy consumption. By encouraging the students to join in creating full-scale mockups of buildings to test daylighting and ventilation through convection along with both sustainable energy and long-life materials, they added to the pedagogy and durability alike.

Jane Holtz Kay is a journalist and author of Asphalt Nation, among other books. She is currently working on Last Chance Landscape, a book on climate change for the University of California Press.

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