AEF, amongst a number of other companies, is volunteering its time to help retrofit a classroom in Davis Magnet School (located in Costa Mesa, California) as part of an exciting United States Green Building Council (USGBC) Orange County program to create a LEED-like classroom and compare it to a conventional, non-LEED classroom (For more on LEED please visit (United States Green Building Council) . Several key purposes driving this transformation are healthy indoor air quality, mitigation of waste during and after construction, improving the performance of students, and lowered operating expenses. The worthy aim of this project is to provide an excellent example of both “economic and environmental stewardship.”
What is unique about this program is that the people who use this classroom (that is, the students and teachers) will actively learn about the metamorphosis that will take place by witnessing it and measuring the environmental ramifications of using a traditional classroom versus a LEED-certified one. That is, it is not an undertaking that is unobtrusively taking place in the background and that can be dismissed as being unrelated and unimportant to the lives of the students and teachers.
It is fitting that Davis Magnet is approaching this retrofitting as a scientific experiment, not only since as a school it places a great deal of importance on the scientific method, but also because by doing so it instills an awareness of environmental issues and the methods of sustainable building in the young minds of our future leaders. However, the lesson on the value of sustainable environments is not to be confined to the academic world, but rather to be disseminated to the community at large.
Select this link for more on Davis Magnet School
