Washington High Performance School Buildings: Report to the Legislature

The Washington State Board of Education and Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction (OSPI) has taken an aggressive stand to encourage the development of high performance school buildings with the goals of improving student achievement, reducing costs and preserving environmental resources. Secondary objectives that can be reached with this approach include retaining our best teachers, increasing average daily attendance, reducing ongoing maintenance costs, strengthening the local community and economy, minimizing the disruption to water flows and natural processes at the site, and educating students on the values of sustainability. To provide order and consistency in pursuing these important goals, several tools have been created by OSPI. The Washington Sustainable Schools Protocol (WSSP) for High Performance School Facilities describes a voluntary pass/fail rating system to evaluate a school’s progress toward sustainability. This rating system is comprised of a number of prerequisites and optional sustainability measures. Each school participating in this protocol chooses from among the list of optional measures to chart a path toward sustainability specific to the site and goals of the district.

The Washington Sustainable Schools (WSS) Planning Workbook outlines a wide range of the benefits that students, teachers and communities derive from these recommended sustainable building practices. The workbook provides valuable how-to knowledge to districts and their design teams before they begin new capital projects.

The Washington Sustainable Schools Pilot Project

As the tools created by OSPI are relatively new, it secured and directed funding to five school districts (shown in the table below) to test the WSSP, implementing a wide range of sustainability measures and gathering data on their value and cost effectiveness. This Pilot Project is the first step towards refining what a sustainable school is and how a district would procure it.

Along with the physical improvements put in place at the five Pilot schools two other important outputs will be gained from the Project. First, the Pilot Project Report describes the results of individual measures by school. This Report to the Legislature takes this initial information from the individual Pilot Project schools and compares it with national research, in order to extrapolate the findings to school districts across Washington State. The intent is to provide an order of magnitude for the costs, benefits and procedural impacts for incorporating sustainable building strategies into school design. This critical information can be used to help legislators and school district personnel make the best decisions about investing in high performance school buildings.

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