Overview
Davenport Community School District had made great efforts to reduce environmental impact and costs, improve student and staff health and provide effective environmental and sustainable education. Like other school districts, we are always required to do more with less. This can be one of the hardest challenges to overcome. By developing and enforcing programs and procedures that conserve energy and other natural resources and by using SAVE and PPEL dollars to reduce general fund expenditures, we can achieve great results.
Energy costs are second only to personnel costs as the leading draw on K-12 school district operating budgets. It is a cost we must and have controlled by various energy efficiency measures. Buildings require on-going tune-ups and efforts to stay efficient and/or improve our efficiency. By making energy-efficient selections in our purchases and keeping what we have working properly and efficiently, we will continue to reduce consumption and costs, will allow us to put those funds back into our classrooms.
Since July 2018, we have completed multiple energy-efficiency measures, 49 of which were eligible for energy-efficiency rebates. LED lighting projects, occupancy and vacancy controls, roof insulation, retro commissioning, Express building tune-ups (quick no cost to low cost improvements), kitchen hood optimization, etc. Rebates received so far total $452,594.98.
Our utility provider estimates we will see annual ongoing savings in energy consumption and costs are estimated at over $100,000 for just these projects. This has helped our district achieve the lowest cost per square foot of Iowa public K-12 schools that have reported their energy data in The Iowa Department of Economic Development's B3 Benchmarking project for public buildings.
Between July 2017 and June 2018, the district saved money on utility costs in spite of increasing building square footage and total energy consumption, as well as experiencing a warmer summer and colder winter. We track almost 3.3 million square feet in B3 Benchmarking. When compared to another school district in Iowa that was closest in size to ours, we pay $0.55 per square foot less. If we paid their rate, we would increase our annual cost an additional $1,805,606. If we paid even the average cost per square foot per year ($.093) of the Iowa public schools currently using the energy tracking database, we would increase our annual costs by more than $1,083,364. Imagine how much money other schools could be putting towards support for the classroom. That being said, imagine our increase in costs if we stopped our efforts or didn’t consider energy efficiency when purchasing equipment or in our energy reduction efforts.
While many benchmarking tools have helped accelerate district sustainability efforts among energy systems, there are additional aspects of a sustainably functioning school district that are also necessary to track and monitor when assessing Davenport Community Schools environmental impact and costs: recycling and waste; food procurement and disposal; building design, and construction material life-cycle management; paper use and transportation. We continue to make efforts to improve energy, water and resource efficiency in all schools to help preserve our budget dollars to use for positions and programs, which directly affect the health, safety and achievement of our students while being good stewards of our planet's resources.
Davenport Sustainability Accomplishments
In-House Participants
Michael Maloney, Dan Burlingame, Erik Page, Joe Reagan, Debbie Mahr (Heitman), Becky Huff
