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.

New York City has two very large buildings dedicated to answering the 911 calls of its five boroughs. With more than 11 million emergency calls annually, it makes perfect sense. The second of these buildings, the Public Safety Answering Center II (PSAC II) is located on a nine-acre parcel of land in the Bronx. It’s an imposing 450,000 square-foot structure—a 240-foot-wide by 240-foot-tall cube. The gleaming aluminum cube risesthe equivalent of 24 stories from behind a grassy berm, projecting the unlikely impression that it might actually be floating. Like most visually striking structures, the building has drawn as much scorn as it has admiration.