Green Schools: Denver School District Leads on Climate Action

by | Aug 21, 2024

The Denver Public School System is quickly becoming a national model for climate education, green school infrastructure, and student engagement. Two years ago, when 30 students came together to rally the School Board of Education to embrace climate action, even they could not have known how quickly clean energy projects would accelerate, from renewable energy to building electrification, to a fleet of electric school buses, and more that save Denver Public Schools (DPS) $5 million a year.

LeeAnn Kittle was brought in as the Director of Sustainability at DPS at the start of the pandemic, her first assignment was to revamp an insufficient HVAC system to address concerns about indoor air quality. That was April 2020. Shortly thereafter, LeeAnn began to receive messages from a group of students meeting weekly on Zoom, an environmental club from across the district. Their immediate request was to draft a policy that focused on climate change to bring before the board of education. With LeeAnn’s coaching, the policy was approved by the board unanimously. That’s when the real work began to create DPS’ first Climate Action Plan alongside community and business leaders, city council members, and even the mayor.

Snapshot

  • Denver Public Schools (DPS) is one of 59 school districts in the nation – out of over 13,000 – that has adopted formal policies and climate action plans to curb carbon emissions
  • DPS has been working on sustainability since 2009. However, it took two years of concerted, savvy organizing by a committed group of 30 students to finally convince the School Board of Education to adopt a formal climate policy in 2022.
  • The results have been extraordinary. In 2023, DPS saved $5 Million on its overall $1 Billion budget due to carbon reduction initiatives.
  • Funding resources and knowledge networks are increasingly available for other school districts that want to implement climate action plans are increasingly available.

 

Listen to LeeAnn Kittle of DPS and Reilly Loveland Falvey of New Buildings Institute on Supercool

Students Rally a School Community

Starting with repairing an insufficient HVAC system during COVID to address concerns about indoor air quality, then new to the Denver Public School system, LeeAnn Kittle found herself on weekly Zoom calls with a core group of environmentally aware students. Impressed by their tenacity, she quickly led the development of the school’s first Climate Action Plan. Working together, those students learned how to make their case to principals, community leaders, business leaders, city council members, and even the mayor. The board of education unanimously approved the students’ first environmental policy. That’s when the real work began.

The Denver Public Schools system had a dedicated climate resource in place since 2009, so they had some existing support and research to build on. According to LeeAnn:

“That sense of urgency wasn’t there until the youth came forward and said, ‘We have climate anxiety. This is real for us. This is affecting our ability to thrive in the learning environment.’ And I think that really hit our leadership like, wow, we want to create the most effective, healthiest learning environment for our young scholars to thrive.”

That’s a powerful lesson for other schools and for students from districts around the country – when students come together and speak in a unified way, parents and local authorities listen. Motivated students can make a significant impact.

Turning Climate Policy into Climate Action

The Climate Action Plan is a highly detailed roadmap that ties back to the core principles established in the policy. LeeAnn, her students, and a handful of local stakeholders from the board established a mission of environmental protection, economic prosperity, and social development. Six frameworks rolled up into the three primary elements of the mission. Some, like solar and electrification, would naturally be expected in Denver, a city known for its plentiful sunshine. Other aspects of the plan might seem less obvious, as LeeAnn explains, “Another thing that students really wanted was to be prepared for a green economy. So that’s another big focus of ours, getting into classrooms and preparing teachers to teach about climate change.” She continues:

“We also have solar shade structures that we’re doing at schools to help with outdoor learning. So solar typically is on the roof or a canopy, and we’re trying to bring it down lower so that students can actually see what solar looks like.”

Taking students out of the classroom to show them the inner workings of a live solar installation has a lasting effect.

Denver has also created a Climate Champions program, a combined fund received from the City and County of Denver that provides students and schools with small grants for project-based learning. The program enables more climate action projects that align with student priorities to go forward while creating pathways for students to actively participate in positive change and gain important leadership, management, and strategic planning skills.

Funding a Climate Action Plan

All of these efforts, from the planning phase forward, are designed to provide students with real-world experience and skills they can put to work when they graduate. For instance, if the students want to propose a new solar initiative, which could be a multi-million dollar project, they have to take on the entire planning process. The students are tasked to learn what these big ideas look like from a budget standpoint, from a project management standpoint, and how to approach stakeholder engagement. It’s an opportunity to teach students a whole set of leadership skills, inclusive of economics. Says LeeAnn:

“We’re very fortunate here in Denver, where our city has a .5% sales tax that has created a $40 million climate fund. And so they have very specific ways we are allowed to use that money. And so, that is something the City and County of Denver and Denver Public Schools have collaborated on where we are leasing our land, they own it, they maintain it, that solar array, we’ve put it over our parking lot at Northeast Early College and then a portion of that energy that’s produced is going to the DPS families in need to offset their utility bills. And then a portion is also coming back to DPS at a guaranteed lower rate than we would pay our utility provider.” 

With all of these accomplishments in Denver, it’s no wonder that the broader professional community has taken notice. One of those key industry players is Reilly Loveland Falvey, Associate Director at the New Buildings Institute, which promotes a built environment that equitably delivers community benefits and climate solutions. As Associate Director, Reilly focuses on schools, energy efficiency, and the path toward zero net energy.

Reilly explains where much of the current funding for school climate initiatives comes from:

“Part of it is the federal government is interested. The Inflation Reduction Act is here, which can help us pay for clean energy. We’ve also seen this sort of generational funding event. It started with the ESSER (Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief) funds and the American Rescue Plan funds that came during COVID-19. So that was the start. There’s the Efficient Healthy Schools Program. There’s a swell from the big dogs on top.” 

With multiple government-led programs underway, now is a good time for school districts to explore net zero and decarbonization.

Getting the Process Started

Whether the goal is to cut costs with renewable energy, achieve net zero, or decarbonization, there is a recommended way to get started. Reilly and the NBI team have created a general framework for districts that are first moving down this path, “We call them the common actions because nobody does anything in the [exact] same way. Those common actions are engaging stakeholders, benchmarking, and seeking all your data sources to understand where you’re even starting so that you can set that goal, formalizing it into documentation, [and] putting it into your work.”

In the case of Denver Public Schools, students were the catalyst. In some states, environmental mandates are in place and sustainability professionals are on staff. Often the impetus is about improving health. “What we saw in the pandemic was that people started paying attention to indoor air quality standards. And that is part of what has started to really ramp it up. So these people are biting into the fact that our buildings are not that healthy [with regard to] the air that the students and the staff breathe.”

Bolstering resiliency is increasingly a driver of these efforts. As the climate changes, certain geographies are contending with new weather patterns. In places dealing with rising temperatures, building managers have been pressed to add air conditioning systems to schools built in a time when it wasn’t needed. Yet, HVAC systems are expensive to purchase and costly to operate. In these cases, in order to offset those new energy demands and reign in the budgetary effects, building managers find it also pays to add renewable energy sources like solar to recoup costs.

Reilly recalled doing a design charette in a South Carolina school that included the typical participants, like architects and engineers when a teacher brought in a middle school student who offered a unique perspective. The student described getting dropped off for school and having to walk across a hot parking lot that was fully exposed to the sun, a firsthand experience as a user of the facility that changed the dynamic in the room and led to an innovative solution from both a climate and student standpoint. Says Reilly:

“And what he then said was, ‘What if we put the solar panels over the parking lot? It gives us shade from the blacktop. The parking drop-off will be a little bit more organized, and we get enough solar,’ and that [recommendation] came entirely from a 13-year-old.”

Net Zero Over Time

Reilly points out, “The existing building stock is our greatest challenge. Sometimes, it can be cheaper to just tear down and build new instead of remediating an existing building. We had an example of that here in Portland where the old building had been unoccupied for so long that it was just more cost-effective to tear down.” Even with the financing and spending programs now available, many districts will have to take a highly practical approach to modernizing their infrastructure on the path to sustainability. 

For many schools, the Climate Action Plan is in place as a guide for steadily transitioning to a green school. It’s a way of institutionalizing a five or ten-year path forward, “so that it’s not just dependent on that champion, that person who has the job. But a school district knows that this is written into the documentation of what we’re going to look at when it’s time to replace a key system.”

Financing Green School Projects

A recurring fascination at Supercool is with how climate innovation spreads across industries and geographies. In short, how do schools learn what they need to know in order to assemble their own Climate Action Plan, like LeeAnn Kittle created with her students in Denver? And how does a budget-constrained education system pay for these improvements?  

Reilly provided an overview of resources to assist with planning, including financial planning:

  1. USGBC’s Center for Green Schools leads a topflight conference every year which includes grant information.
  2. New Buildings Institute also helps run the Efficient and Healthy Schools Program, which is a Department of Energy program that includes free technical assistance.
  3. The Inflation Reduction Act is a generational funding event to help school districts pay for solar, wind, and energy-efficient HVAC systems.
  4. The 179 D tax credit is also essential for schools planning to retrofit, it helps schools get money back through their design teams who apply for the credit based on savings to the school system.
  5. EPA funds Community Change Grants are also part of the Inflation Reduction Act and help disadvantaged communities address environmental and climate justice challenges through projects that cut pollution, increase climate resilience, and build community capacity.

School buildings impact children and staff in many ways. As more schools start the process of upgrading, modernizing, and securing funding for climate action, there remains a lack of research into the academic performance benefits that many suggest accrue once climate initiatives are in place.. Studies have shown that ample daylighting helps students focus. Research also indicates that an efficient HVAC system enables students and teachers to be more comfortable, which also can boost academic performance. 

However, comprehensive research that ties a new green-certified school building, for example, to better student performance remains absent. It’s the precise kind of research that would be most compelling to parents, students, and administrators weighing whether to invest in capital projects that also reduce carbon emissions. “The prototype schools in Baltimore [are] a great example of how you could do this in a really scientifically sound way, but the data that points to the indoor air quality or points to daylighting and those kinds of things, those are still very important and very relevant to what the message is here,” Reilly confirms. 

However, a concerted push for more data-driven research connecting climate action to student outcomes has yet to come into view, answering questions such as:  

  • If you build these buildings, what does it mean for our children and their future?
  • What does it mean for building staff and teachers?
  • Can we lower absences?
  • Do green schools reduce illnesses or asthma symptoms?

There’s still a lot to learn.

For now, we know that these buildings better prepare students for the low-carbon economy and save taxpayers large sums of money that would otherwise perpetuate outmoded levels of carbon emissions. That’s a very strong argument for accelerating positive change.

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