K-12 school daylighting initiative created to promote best practices

Eneref Institute, an advocacy organization for sustainable development, launched Constellation Networking Group of School Administrators to share ideas to overcome market obstacles to daylighting in K-12 schools.

Eneref invites administrators who are considering including daylighting in their schools, or who want to share their experience about daylighting with other administrators to join the group. The group will first tackle impediments to greater use of natural interior daylight in school facilities.

Natural interior daylight, or “daylighting,” increases student performance, a key finding in the 1999 Heschong Mahone report “Daylighting in Schools: An Investigation into the Relationship Between Daylighting and Human Performance,” Eneref says. A report by Eneref examining the success in one elementary school confirmed those findings, based on interviews with school staff. The report is available for download at: http://eneref.org/report-details/teachers-preferred-natural-daylight-inside-pa-elementary-school/

School administrators who participate in Eneref’s Daylighting for School Facilities Constellation will learn from industry experts as well as network with other education leaders as part of a group that drives change. Participants meet by roundtable web conference a few times per year as schedules permit. Networking within Eneref Constellations leads to partnerships between end-users, businesses and researchers, facilitating the transfer of new technologies to the market, Eneref says.