The green building community is the latest group to rally behind the $160 million school bond referendum.
New Hanover County Schools worked with the Cape Fear provisional branch of the U.S. Green Building Council – North Carolina Chapter, previously the Cape Fear Green Building Alliance, to organize an Oct. 15 tour of Snipes Academy of Arts & Design in support of the bond.
Snipes was built in 2010 with funds from the last education bond, approved in 2005. It is the county’s only LEED Gold-certified school. If the 2014 bond is approved, Blair Elementary School will be reconstructed based on a prototype design used for Snipes.
The tour is the first advocacy effort for the Cape Fear provisional branch, said environmental educator Jessica Wilson, since the group shifted gears from education to education and advocacy for local issues related to their mission.
“Our mission is to support healthy built environments, so it’s critical to support the bond referendum from our standpoint because it does promote those healthy built environments we need for our community,” Wilson said.
Eddie Anderson, director of facility planning and construction with the school system, led a tour of the school. Anderson explained how sustainable features yielded multiple benefits.
All classrooms in Snipes were designed to maximize daylight with architectural features that evenly distribute natural light throughout the rooms.
In north-facing classrooms, the ceiling gently slopes downward away from tall windows to push light to the back of the room. Across the hall, windows in south-facing classrooms are outfitted with overhangs and Solera glass to reflect light to the ceiling, also sloped to distribute light.
Lighting costs account for 25 percent of the school system’s overall energy use. In addition to energy savings, Anderson said daylit rooms boost student performance and attendance and improve teacher retention.
Before the tour, Anderson explained school needs behind the bond.
New Hanover County Schools welcomed its largest class of 26,000 students during the 2013-14 school year, topping overall capacity by 3,500 students. The state estimates the school will secure 3,000 additional students by 2020, and Anderson said actual growth has outnumbered projected growth for the last four years.
The school system has lost funding while its population grows. The capital fund, which pays for facilities maintenance, dipped from $7 million to $3 million in the 2007–08 fiscal year, when the recession whittled the county’s contribution to the fund and the Public School Building Capital Fund, a state money stream created in 1987 to help schools address facility needs, was eliminated.
The proposed bond will accommodate a growing population with a new elementary school in the northeast area of the county, reconstruction of College Park and Blair Elementary Schools, and new gymnasiums to hold all students at Laney and Hoggard High Schools.
Wrightsville Beach Elementary School will also undergo renovation and expansion with bond dollars.
The school system will catch up on deferred maintenance for all schools with system-wide technology and hard infrastructure improvements.
“A lot of what we’ll be doing, you won’t see. It’s building infrastructure, but we all know how important it is for the learning environment to keep a constant temperature and keep the lights on,” Anderson said.
The event is the first of three community meetings organized by New Hanover County Schools. Bond representatives will speak at Blair Elementary School on Oct. 28 and Myrtle Grove Middle School on Oct. 30, both from 5 to 7 p.m.
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