Today's schools face more difficult challenges than ever before, With 55 million students, 5 million facilities representing 20 % of America's population.  School's spend more on utilities than they do on teachers salary's, books, computers etc.

This you already know! What you don't know is that the 1st step for a greener school environment is saving energy.  Manager's looking to reduce their annualized operationing cost  would benifit greatly by taking an envirronmental sensitive approach to managing their HVAC comfort systems in the facilities that foster the health and well being of our students, staff, and teachers in the  educational  learning environment. Annualized operating cost for maintaining in-door comfort in our school systems amount to 71% of the energy used.
 
It's really simple!

An example would be a school district in the county in which I reside has an annual electrical bill of $12,884,000.00  for 28 county Pre-k -12  schools.  At an average of 71% of energy being used for comfort condition the cost is $9,147,640.00 annually.

By addressing on-going deferred HVAC maintenace issues, In-door Air Quality (IAQ) and implementing a "Green" program  specifically geared toward school districts looking to make their existing buildings more efficent.  They would benifit greatly in reducing their energy usage by a minimum of 10% annually. This would be a savings of  $914,764.00 annually or an average of  $32,670.00 per school annually. Alliance Green offers helpful guidelines for  "Processes and Practices for going "GREEN" programs.

 Our goal is to provide  materials that include key learning concepts for green schools, and information about ways to save energy and improve  the environmental conditions that foster the health and  well being of our children in their learning environment.

One in five U.S. schools have in-door air quality (IAQ) problems, a real concern in parents, teachers and faculty because:

• Children are still developing physically and are more greatly affected by pollutants.
  
• The number of children with asthma is up 49% in the past 20 years.
  
• Children under the age of 10 have 3 times as many colds as adults.
  
• Another consideration is that the sole purpose of a school facility is to foster the learning process, which is impacted directly by the quality of the in-door environmental conditions.
  
• The most commonly cited building factor associated with schools and in-door (IAQ) complaints was insufficient outdoor air supply; moisture problems was ranked second , and poor air distribution was ranked third.
  
• A prerequisite in our class rooms is that 15 cubic ft. per minute per student of outdoor air on a continuous basis was required to maintain C02 concentration levels below 100 part per minute.