Engaging Students in Conservation Program Proves Successful
/Our Energy and Sustainability Services group introduced its first Energy + Resource Conservation Program over a decade ago to the West Chester Area School District. The program focused on conserving energy through behavior changes and it consisted of 3 primary elements:
Motivational presentations to all faculty, outlining the reasons to save energy and concrete ideas for saving energy in the school.
Monitoring & Validating (M+V) Tracking, including posters delivered to all schools each month, with savings tracked by kWh, cost and CO2 emissions
Teacher/student club support for any teacher and/or student group expressing interest in working on the conservation program.
The result– in West Chester’s 16 schools, we achieved a 13% district-wide reduction in electricity consumption and greenhouse gas emission and a 7.3% reduction in utility costs during the first 6 months of the program. At Henderson High School where students supplemented the program with their own “Power Down Friday” campaign, we achieved a 21% reduction in electricity us eand Greenhouse Gas emissions and a 9/.4% reduction in utility costs.
The lesson - student engagement contributed greatly to program success.
The overall success of the program laid the foundation to secure a $150,000 EPA Climate Showcase Communities grant, which enabled the creation of the West Chester Student Conservation Corps with the District’s facilities Department. Our team continued to work for 4 years, thanks to a second, follow-on Environmental Education grant from the PA Department of Education written and secured by our firm. Overall, the program reduced electricity consumption 17%, eliminated 21 million pounds of CO2 emissions, and saved $1.3 million in electricity costs.
The Educational Program
Structuring an Educational Program specifically to your school community is critical to the program’s success.
Key Elements for Success
Research-based motivational techniques. Human behavior can be challenging to influence, since behaviors derive from ingrained habits, subcortical processes, and basic biological make-up-all subconscious activities. Fortunately, there is a vast library of scientific research exposing how the brain works on this subconscious level, and many researches have applie dthis understanding to behavior change techniques. To masximize the effectives of the educational program, we integrate specific, scientifically grounded motivational techniques.
M+V Tracking. A core component of a successful behavior change program is continual feedback to building occupants so that they can realize the results of their efforts. Developing a normalization methodology to accurately account for changes in weather and building use is especially important to educational-based programs.
Identifying impactful opportunities upfront. Over the past decade many schools have undergone various forms of energy efficiency improvements. As a result, opportunities for student and teacher behaviors to impact energy consumption may be less apparent. In schools that have undergone upgrades, its important to focus efforts on meaningful behavioral changes that remaining like additional plug loads or operational refinements. For those schools that have not undergone upgrades, the opportunities are readily apparent and can begin with simple efforts like turning out lights and shutting down computers.
Inter-Departmental Participation. We have found that participation from various departments helps create a cultural shift and helps the school community affect real and lasting change.
Structured curricular component. An increasing number of districts recognize that energy and sustainability is a key challenge for our future citizens. As a result, we have added a more structured curricular component to our program that aligns with the Pennsylvania Academic Standards—namely, Environment and Ecology and S.T.E.M. The alignment with these standards not only supports many districts’ desire to better educate students about sustainability, it also aligns with the programming teachers are already utilizing in their classrooms.
Add a resource component. Many school districts want to expand their sustainability initiatives beyond energy. Therefore expanding focus to such areas as recycling or paper conservation increases opportunities for programming and savings.
Incentives. It’s important to remember that an incentive is all it takes to increase participation. When appropriate, we facilitate incentives for top-performing schools. Sometimes it’s the ice cream party at the end of the school year that fosters energy savings.