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PrintBuilding Green, Saving Green
New Jackson grade school pushes the eco-envelope.
Parents snap photos as they escort their children into Davey Jackson Elementary for the first day of school.
Can you imagine taking a test with the lights off?
Students at the new Davey Jackson Elementary School—a namesake of the early nineteenth-century mountain man for whom Jackson Hole is named—do just that. In fact, they’ll rarely have to turn the lights on. The space-age school boasts dozens of light tubes sticking up from its roof like porcupine quills. Those tubes, which flood the rooms with natural light, combine with big windows and light reflectors to provide ideal light levels without electricity—unless it’s cloudy, when the electric lights come on just enough to make up the difference.
It’s one of hundreds of energy-efficient upgrades that make this the greenest school in Wyoming. Some features, like triple-pane windows and triple-thick insulation, aren’t as sexy. Others, like recycling warm air in the filtration system so the school loses less heat in winter, seem so technologically advanced that one wonders how they could be cost-effective.
Davey Jackson Elementary opened September 2 for kindergarten, first-grade, and second-grade students. It’s not just the state’s greenest school—it’s also been the most expensive to build, with a price tag of approximately $24 million. In the long run, though, the school will save not only the environment, but dollars.
“Fifteen years,” says Kevin Thibeault, Teton County School District No.1 facilities manager. “In fifteen years we’ll pay for all the extra money we spent to make that building energy efficient. That’s all it will take. That’s how much energy we’ll save.”
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency estimated the green building would save the school district about $17,000 a year in energy costs. The agency awarded Hawtin-Jorgensen Architects the “Designed to Earn the Energy Star” designation for their design of the 81,844-square-foot school, making it one of just forty-six designs nationwide to achieve the recognition in 2008.
“I’m not a real greeny,” Thibeault says. “But this [was] the right thing to do.”
Davey Jackson is just the second school building in Wyoming to receive Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) certification, and the first to attain the LEED gold-level certification. This resulted not only from the green construction and design of the new building, but also from the environmentally friendly way the old facility was demolished. The district recycled as much of it as possible, selling or giving away old pillars and support beams and crushing concrete walls to use as filling material in new athletic fields. Such recycling of old mat-erials made the project more time-consuming and labor intensive, but worth it, Thibeault says, after he saw how much was reused and how little went to the landfill.
Students planted a time capsule before the start of the school year, and this year’s third graders, who didn’t get to attend the new school, left their mark by painting animal paw prints in the art room before the end of the 2008–09 school year.
The building encompasses two levels and a large cafeteria featuring high ceilings, good acoustics, and a huge picture window with an unobstructed view of the National Elk Refuge. Opening with 450 students, it’s designed to hold up to 500.
“We’re so happy with our new home,” raves principal Deb Roehrkasse.
It’s good being green.
