Assistant Superintendent Dave Boyle said the current, traditional heating, ventilation and cooling system heats classrooms unevenly, making for an odd-looking group of students and teachers.
"In one room, people will be in their winter coats and in the next room, they're in T-shirts," he said.
It's a problem he believes will be relieved when students move in 2007 from the campus in Fleming, built in 1968, to a planned $42.1 million BOCES campus in Aurelius. The new buildings will have a geothermal system, which will heat them more uniformly and save energy.
Cayuga-Onondaga BOCES is one of a handful of schools districts in the region taking drastic measures to make their buildings environmentally sensitive, or "green." The Auburn center also will use more natural lighting, reduce its water consumption and recycle at least 50 percent of the byproducts left from the new building construction, Boyle said.
The national move toward "healthier" schools began about 10 years ago in New York state, where more than 3 million children attend schools every day in more than 4,000 buildings, said Claire Barnett, of the Healthy Schools Network.
"It's not just becoming greener, it's making the whole school environment healthier," she said. "Schools are not only doing it to save money and honor the environment and the outdoors, but because it's good for children, their primary occupants."
She said school environments, historically, have been poorly designed, constructed and maintained, all of which can lead to health concerns. Schools have been encouraged during the past decade, she said, to consider long-term effects of their building projects and building maintenance.
Among the newest initiatives is a state law to take effect in September for using green cleaning products in school to improve indoor air quality.
"Children breathe more air per pound than adults, and injury done to a child is a lifelong injury," Barnett said. "Healthier schools improve test scores, absenteeism and suspension rates."
Manlius Pebble Hill School in DeWitt is constructing a new Center for Early Learning, set to open in September, that will be eco-friendly, Head of School Baxter Ball said. He said the school's national organization, National Association Independent Schools, is pushing all its members to become greener.
"Our mission statement talks about becoming a responsible citizen in the global community. We risked saying one thing and doing another if we didn't look to make our facilities green," Ball said. "It was an ethical issue of not being good citizens ourselves if we didn't do this."
The new center will include interior lights that adjust to available natural light, low-flow faucets and toilets, windows that bring more natural light inside, in-floor radiant heat and trenches to collect and filter storm water. The school will require contractors to use specific eco-friendly techniques and low gas-emitting materials, and that they use locally-produced and recycled materials as much as possible.
It doesn't take a new building to be green. The U.S. Green Building Council encourages green practices such as energy-efficient lighting, recycling and avoiding materials with toxic ingredients.
Those ideas are just fine with senior Sarah Orbesen and sophomore Celesta Collacchi, members of Chittenango High School's Envirothon team. They said most students and many adults do not understand the need to protect the environment.
"It's not on the front page of the paper. People aren't really aware, or else they don't really care," Collacchi said. "It might not seem like a lot to turn off the lights in one classroom, but in a big school with so many classrooms, it really adds up and makes a difference."
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