Flooring for Green Schools

Think about this, we send our children to spend six or more hours a day in facilities that just barely meet health and safety standards. Is this sustainable or even healthy?   Every child deserves to go to a learning environment with conditions that give the child the best opportunity to learn as much as possible with healthy air to breathe and conditions that encourage learning.

Everybody knows that green schools are healthy for kids and conducive to their education but for some reason budgets or politics or both cause us from stopping short of doing the right things for our kids.  The USGBC highlights 4 key items that green schools encourage including daylight and views, indoor air quality, excellent acoustics and thermal comfort.  Many studies have demonstrated direct educational and health benefits from these four areas of focus.  Interestingly enough the flooring choices architects and school districts make have a very large impact on all four of these influencing factors.  By now, most all educators, architects and designers understand that daylight improves performance and attitude of students and teachers alike but very few ever stop to think about what glare does to students and teachers.  While daylight is positive, glare from shiny floors have a negative impact on students performance in classrooms and often cause them stress and inability to pay attention to the material being taught.  So why all the shiny floors full of glare?

Acoustics absolutely play a role on how students learn and we have learned through many studies that too much reverberation in a learning environment causes hearing challenges to students.  Why then do we continue to install hard surface materials in our learning environments when we know they dramatically increase reverberation for our students?  This seems counterproductive yet these flooring types have become the standard for many schools. 

Comfortable indoor temperatures have also been studied and we know that flooring temperature can be critical since our feet are always touching the floor and influencing how we feel.  Yet most schools put down floor surfaces with little or no RValue and no impact on the indoor temperature, the reduction of wasted energy or the increased occupant satisfaction as it relates to temperature.  Is this consistent with what we know to be good and healthy for our students and teachers?

And lastly, we know that good indoor air quality improves health; however, we are completely misguided in our understanding of how flooring impacts IAQ.  Many educators and parents believe that soft surfaces create IAQ and mold issues and recent studies are indicating a different story that must be investigated. In actuality, our school HVAC closets are indicators that dust is circulating all over schools because there is nowhere for it to go and it is never taken out of the school.  Chemicals used to clean and shine hard surface floors are ending up on bookshelves, desk tops and in our children’s lungs and dust from the,”pigpen effect,” is everywhere.  We must re-look at these issues and adapt the flooring for our schools as we move into a more intelligent and sustainable period for our schools.

Green Schools Make Cents

Almost one quarter of America goes to school every day. Unfortunately way too many of these students and teachers attend schools that are inefficient do not foster learning in the best environment possible and are exposed to unnecessary health risks. These schools are also often wasteful of our resources and miss obvious opportunities to reduce operational costs. Fortunately now, both public and private schools are realizing that going green is a no-brainer.

Going green can often easily reduce $100,000 per year in operational costs. While that doesn’t always sound like that much in comparison to our total school budgets, think of that savings in terms of a couple new teachers salaries, thousands of additional textbooks and hundreds of new computers for that school. That is worth striving for and a great reason to go green. By promoting the greening of all schools, not only can we make a tremendous impact on the environment but we can also improve teacher retention, student health, and test scores while reducing school operational costs. So what are the key areas we should focus on?

Every child deserves to go to a school with healthy air to breathe and conditions that encourage learning. Green schools are healthy for kids and conducive to their education. Four key areas that these schools focus on include daylight, indoor air quality, acoustics and thermal comfort. Green schools encourage daylight and outside views since studies show that daylight improves student performance. It also keeps teachers healthy and happy and that reduces teacher absenteeism and teacher turnover which amounts to huge savings over the lifetime of a school.

Green schools also strive for better indoor air quality because we know that improves health. Building green means better acoustics because it improves learning potential and poor acoustics have been shown to negatively impact both the teacher and the student. Good acoustics in classrooms ensure that teachers can be heard without straining their voices. Finally, comfortable indoor temperatures have shown to increase all building occupant satisfaction but if done correctly, building methods can also reduce energy usage while improving thermal comfort. Our nation’s students and teachers deserve healthy and effective spaces for learning and teaching. You can make a difference by letting elected officials know our schools should be built, operated, and maintained green.