Md. Independent schools are going green

Posted: 6:08 pm Thu, January 28, 2010
By Alan Dessoff

Independent schools in Maryland are going green in many ways. Sometimes they do it from the ground up and sometimes from the roof down.

Friends Community School in College Park did it from the ground up when it constructed a 27,000-square-foot, $5.7 million classroom building out of straw bales in 2007. The stacked bales, made of straw grown locally and covered with mud and then plaster, make up the walls of the school. The building also features a green roof, a rain garden and bio-retention areas, radiant floor heating and waterless urinals.

A key benefit of straw-bale construction is the insulation it provides, saving the school money on energy.

“We are generally pleased with it in terms of being environmentally friendly and having a wonderful insulating material,” says Larry Clements, head of school. “It’s inexpensive and should live a long life.”

Roland Park Country School in Baltimore went green from the roof down when it built its entire athletic complex as a green building that provides both energy and water efficiency. A key feature is its 14,000-square-foot green roof, which is “performing great,” according to Nancy Mugele, the school’s director of communications.

“It has grown well and the routine maintenance we have performed has not brought any issues to light,” she says.

The plants on the green roof absorb radiant energy so that it doesn’t enter the building, while a reflective white roof minimizes the heat island effects of traditional roofs by reflecting radiant heat energy back into the atmosphere. In each room, an occupancy sensor turns the lights off when people exit.

Rainwater refrigerator

The large number of windows in the athletic center harvest daylight while minimizing heat transfer, and the building’s cooling tower cools stored rainwater, which then passes through a compressor, much like a refrigerator, to cool the building.

The athletic complex has a high-efficiency boiler that heats the building and provides hot water for sinks and showers so no hot water heater is needed. Carbon dioxide sensors in the gym control the amount of outside air brought in by the ventilation system.

For water efficiency, the green roof is planted with special grasses and sedum that absorb water, filter pollutants and reduce storm water runoff. The white roof is designed to capture rainwater and channel it into a 10,000-gallon tank, where it is stored and used in the building’s cooling tower to reduce the use of city water. Low-flow fixtures are throughout the building in showers, toilets and sinks.

On the playing fields and north parking lot, the storm water runs off into large storage tanks under the fields, where it is filtered before trickling slowly into the ground. Native plantings are used around the complex, reducing the need to irrigate and thereby saving more water.

The Athletic Center at Roland Park has gone green in the use of materials and resources in its construction and outfitting. Several rooms have floors made from the floor of the old gym. Cabinetry is made from wood certified by the Forest Stewardship Council, and many of the cabinets were manufactured locally from wood harvested within 500 miles of the school.

Countertops were made from recycled paper products. Recycled material also was used in the steel beams of the building, carpet, linoleum, ceiling tiles, and the rubber mat on the running track.

All paint, caulking and adhesives used in the building have low levels of volatile organic compounds. All cleaning products are biodegradable and have low toxicity.

Teaching a lesson

Ereni Malfa, who teachers upper school science at Roland Park, uses the whole athletic complex as an example of green architecture and construction in a senior elective course on sustainable design and engineering.

“We talk about the green roof in terms of its impact on the heating and cooling of the building and storm water management,” Malfa says. “We also discuss it as a habitat.”

The Gibson Island Country School, in Pasadena, has plans for a green roof, says Tim Decker, science teacher and environmental program director. Meanwhile, it uses rain barrels and rain gardens to collect water.

“We sit right on the Magothy River and we’re trying to keep all our water on the property without running off. It replenishes the aquifer and helps feed our gardens and water the grass,” Decker says.

The school also is seeking grants to install solar tubes to bring in natural light, and for hands-free faucets in the bathrooms to save water.

Its students helped build a geodesic greenhouse on the campus last year, where the school grows its own food, with scraps going into a compost heap.

Nothing goes to waste

“We recycle just about everything,” Decker declares. “We have trash-free days when we try not to produce any trash at all. Everything is recycled or composted.

“We’re trying to do all we can without major amounts of money, because we don’t have that.”

Bullis School, in Potomac, recently unveiled the largest solar electric power system at a private school in the Washington area. Its 540 solar panels will produce 143,000 kilowatt-hours of electricity annually, supplying 18 to 20 percent of the annual electricity needs for the school’s Blair Family Center for the Arts.

St. Martin’s-in-the-Field Day School, in Severna Park, is looking for changes in small but effective ways.

“We’re trying to obtain a larger recycling dumpster and we’ll have rain barrels connected soon,” reports Cynthia Barry, librarian and communications director.

“We have lots of good ideas and they don’t always involve construction but do involve the way people use the space around them. We are making small changes that can have big differences,” Barry says.

Green schools aren’t entirely trouble-free. At Friends Community School, for example, a water problem developed with the straw bales, perhaps because of improperly installed window casings, reports Dave Woolley-Wilson, executive director of the Green Building Institute in Jessup. “Now they have moldy straw bales,” he says.

“The greatest enemy of straw-bale construction is water,” asserts Andrew Morrison, whose Oregon-based company, A.C. Morrison Construction, specializes in straw-bale construction.

Clements, the head of school, declined to talk on the record about the problem, except to say “We’re working at it.” The school has no other green-building plans right now, says Clements.

“We just moved into this,” he says. “We’d like to spend a few years in this new site before thinking about any future steps.”