K-12 School Districts
K-12 School Districts
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K-12 school districts spend nearly $8 billion annually on energy costs, the second largest expense after teacher salaries. Aging facilities combined with limited school budgets result in deferred maintenance of facilities with an estimated $270 billion needed for infrastructure repairs. |
Better Buildings Goal Achievers are leaders in energy efficiency and stand as an example for their peers. Meet the partners who have met their commitments to reduce portfolio-wide energy use by 20% - 25% in 10 years or less.
Watch all previously recorded webinars in the On-Demand Webinars library sorted by popular topics such as resilience, zero energy buildings, and more.
To date, the 900+ Better Buildings partners have saved more than 2.5 quadrillion Btus, saving more than $15 billion and 155 million tons of CO2.
Featured Solutions
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This resource helps states, local school administrators, school boards, and facilities personnel supporting rural school districts make prudent decisions around the use of funds for energy efficiency improvements as a part of their master facilities management plan. |
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K-12 Solutions for Building Energy Excellence Solution Roundup This collection of Solutions-at-a-Glance from the Better Buildings K-12 partners provides various unique approaches to addressing energy efficiency issues in K-12 public schools.
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K-12 Lighting Toolkit Toolkits This toolkit covers a wide range of guidance, case studies, specifications, and more related to lighting technologies in K-12 schools.
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Developed as part of DOE's Zero Energy Schools Accelerator (ZESA), this guide outlines 8 steps to creating a Zero Energy school. |
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Los Angeles Unified School District HEROES for Zero Energy Efficiency Framework Implementation Model Los Angeles Unified School Disctirct (LAUSD) lacked a comprehensive framework for tracking and measuring energy consumption and engaging staff, students, and the community. The District developed a suite of programs focused on health and wellness, education, recognizing partnerships, optimizing performance, improving efficiency, and sharing best practices to help achieve these goals.
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Aurora Public Schools: Innovations for Incentivizing Energy Conservation Implementation Model Aurora Public Schools created an incentive-based energy conservation program to improve energy efficiency and student engagement district-wide, and has achieved a 12% energy reduction as of 2017 from a 2013 baseline.
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This document includes steps that building owners and operators can implement to achieve smart, healthy, and low-carbon primary schools within their existing building portfolios. Primary schools often use packaged rooftop units for heating, cooling, and ventilation. |
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This document includes steps that building owners and operators can implement to achieve smart, healthy, and low-carbon secondary schools within their existing building portfolios. Secondary schools often include complex heating and cooling systems or packaged rooftop units and can include specialty equipment for gymnasiums, pools, and buses. |
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This report challenges the assumption that zero-energy K-12 schools are cost-prohibitive. By examining the costs of a subset of existing ZE schools and the strategies used to contain those costs, architects, engineers, owners, and researchers are challenging the notion that cost is a barrier to building ZE schools. |