AFT local rallies behind effort to bring 'green schools' to Cincinnati

Cincinnati is moving to the cutting edge of the “green schools” movement, thanks to some outside-the-box thinking from community groups, including the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers.

As part of a comprehensive school-building upgrade in the district that began three years ago, the Cincinnati board of education recently pledged to build and upgrade almost two dozen schools based on national standards for environmentally friendly buildings—recognition that schools work best when they are designed with such things as indoor air quality, energy efficiency, and effective use of natural light as priority considerations.

Those green-school principles have carried throughout the community, spurred on by the Growing Green and Healthy Schools coalition, a network of education, health and labor groups. The network began to coalesce and build last year as the school system developed plans for the reconstruction of Pleasant Hill, a K-8 school in the city. Residents of the Pleasant Hill community, including faculty from the University of Cincinnati’s school of architecture, took the lead at school facilities commission meetings; they pointed to studies showing a direct connection between student achievement and the presence of natural light in classrooms, and they pressed for a heating and cooling design that could increase attendance by reducing the risk of transmitting airborne contaminants. In the end, the commission approved a design that made natural light, indoor air quality and energy efficiency the top three building priorities.

Teachers were onboard with the concept from the start, reports Diana Porter of the Cincinnati Federation of Teachers. “Members can tell horror stories of the mold inside buildings as they got older and older,” she says. “Every teacher I have talked to has been very, very supportive. When you show them pictures of the kind of school we could have, they get very excited.”

The Green and Healthy Schools coalition, which includes the Women’s City Club, the Health Foundation, CFT and other labor organizations, used the experience at Pleasant Hill as a springboard for a comprehensive district approach to school design. They enlisted the aid of the national AFT, which helped arrange get-ting presenters from leading “green building” architectural firms. The information these experts presented to Cincinnatians drove home the point that, while the green building approach may have higher up-front costs, these strategies more than pay for themselves over the life of the building in the form of energy savings, reduced absenteeism from respiratory illness, and environmental protection through careful management of the site.

What’s going on in Cincinnati is nothing short of a sea change, says Porter, who notes the school system only recently retired some 19th-century school buildings that relied on coal-burning furnaces. And Cincinnati’s experience underscores how the issue of school facilities can naturally engage and mobilize parents, teachers and civic groups—a fact that bodes well for AFT efforts to put this issue on the front burner through our union’s “Building Minds, Minding Buildings” campaign.