News Roundup

School Savings Sprout From Global Green

City Business
March 7, 2008
Stephen Maloney

NEW ORLEANS — A. P. Tureaud Elementary School on Pauger Street is a whole lot greener today even without a new coat of paint.

Santa Monica, Calif. -based Global Green USA designated Tureaud as its first Green Seed School in June and immediately went to work on the 69-year-old Seventh Ward building.

The International School of Louisiana and Martin Luther King Jr. Charter School have also been named Green Seed schools. Program director Beth Galante said more schools will be added as work progresses.

Each school will receive up to $75,000 from a $2-million grant Global Green obtained from the Bush-Clinton Katrina Relief Fund in September 2006.

After a detailed audit of Tureaud’s energy consumption and a campus inspection, Galante’s team of workers began the “green changes.”

The school improvements cost $68,612 and are expected to save the school $26,438 per year in energy costs, so the green investment will be recouped in about 2.5 years, program assistant Linda Morgano said.

Most changes reversed years of deferred maintenance and poorly planned lighting schemes, Galante said.

“We’re finding the same issues at all the schools,” she said. “The main thing we’re seeing is an incredible overuse of lighting.”

Classrooms are lit by three to four banks of fluorescent lights despite an abundance of natural light, Galante said.

“In the audit we determined the school used twice as many lumens as necessary,” Galante said. “You can actually figure out how much daylight each classroom is going to have and how much light students need to read and do school work.”

Automatic occupancy and daylight sensors installed in every room will reduce the amount of time lights are turned on by 35 percent and save the school $8,768 — or 185,615-kilowatt hours of electricity — per year, Galante said.

Solar window screens installed on the east side of the building control how much light and heat enter the building, reducing glare and helping cool the classrooms, Galante said.

“The air filters were shockingly filthy,” she said. “Just replacing those filters allowed the air handlers to work much more efficiently and drastically improved the quality of air within the building.”

Broken windowpanes allowed air from the ventilation system to flow through the cracks, Galante said. Applying weather stripping and caulking doors and windows saved 7 percent in heating and cooling costs, she said.

Global Green’s energy audit revealed Tureaud’s 38,366-square-foot school building released 754,000 pounds of carbon dioxide per year — 15.8 percent more than the average building its size. Improvements will reduce its carbon footprint by 247,768 pounds per year.

Tureaud Principal Peretta White-Mitchell said she didn’t have an environmentally friendly mindset until she saw the energy audit.

“I leave here very late, so when I was going home at 7 p. m. and all the lights were still on in the building I wouldn’t think anything of it,” White-Mitchell said. “Now with the motion sensors in every room, the lights are automatically turned off when everyone leaves, even when the children go down to lunch. It’s just wonderful how the sensors work.”

White-Mitchell said any money the state-run Recovery School District saves as a result of the green changes can be spent on more useful expenses such as textbooks and supplies.

Galante said changing student perceptions about energy savings will alter their consumption habits and create a ripple effect of environmental consciousness.

“It almost makes me want to cry to see how involved the children get,” Galante said. “These are really simple changes but they really do make a huge difference.”