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Where Every Issue is a Green Issue| Providing Wisdom in Building a Sustainable Future | ||||||||||||||||||||
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It's Back to (Greener) School by Elaine Ireland When I was a kid, every summer toward the end of August I actually started looking forward to school starting up again. New stuff to learn. Maybe some new kids and definitely some familiar faces I hadn't seen all summer. I liked getting prepared with new tools, notebooks, pens, colors, pencils — I'm still a pencil fan. Living in harmony with the seasons reflects the entire notion of going back to school. School and Fall inherently just come with more indoor activities balanced by soon to be raked and jumped in piles of leaves. Outdoors. Then indoors. Rake and jump. Its become a natural linear progression. I loved summers running under the sprinklers, swimming, going on vacation. But now its coming on fall, with some things new again. I didn't have the expectation to miss summer all that much. I thought it'll be around again. The same but new again. Little did I know then how soon it actually does come around again. Little did I know then too how things would change. And change it has! A new era is upon us. The tipping point is here. That is, the explosion of GREEN. All kinds of building projects, but particularly shools and universities have been at the forefront of green building. We've included many stories this September issue about the greening of schools. Here's just four examples: The Napa Valley Unified School District will become one of eight school districts in the U.S. - and the first in California - to operate a new plug-in hybrid electric school bus. CHPS schools, born out of the 1999 California Energy crisis, are environmentally sustainable and healthy places of learning. They help achieve higher student performance with higher environmental quality. They belong to the next generation and the next generation of schools. Another example of green progress being made is the call for greener products and services within schools. Again from California, a bond allocating $100 million of incentive grants for green, or high performance, K-12 schools. Parents and kids are making a difference and teaming up with organizations, creating incentive award programs such as Green Cleaning. "The goal of the award is to identify and recognize schools and universities that have gone beyond simply making Green product choices. Although products are important, exemplary programs go much further -- they include policies, procedures, training, shared responsibility and other efforts that result in an effective cleaning program that minimizes harmful impacts on the health of building occupants and custodians, and on the environment as a whole." Kids are the future. They deserve the healthiest, safest environments we can create for them — indoors and outdoors. |
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