Links

USGBC Web Sites
  • U.S. Green Building Council, LEED for Schools
    The U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED for Schools page contains valuable information and resources on LEED for Schools. Download a free copy of the LEED for Schools Rating System, order a LEED for Schools Reference Guide or sign up for an instructor lead Technical Review. The USGBC’s Web site contains a host of valuable information on green building, LEED Green Building Rating Systems, educational offerings and local chapters.
  • Greenbuild International Conference and Expo
  • Greenbuild365
    This site offers year-round access to green-building information and educational tools, including videos from the last Greenbuild.
  • Green Home Guide
    A source for information, tips, tools and resources for homeowners, renters and others interested in going green at home.
  • U.S Green Building Council, Education
    The USGBC Education page provides links for educators, administrators, students, teachers, and parents interested in building high-performance school buildings or developing green curricula. You’ll also find resources for implementing sustainable practices at schools or universities. Those wishing to learn more or expand their expertise may sign up for LEED for Schools educational programs, including both live and online courses.

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General Green Schools Resources
  • The National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities
    The NCEF Web site contains a wealth of information about educational facilities, including research, studies and reports. It is managed by the National Institute of Building Sciences.
  • Green Schools Alliance
    The Green Schools Alliance is a nationwide initiative that is committed to working with pre-K to grade-12 independent, private and public school communities to implement energy and resource efficiency through the lens of sustainability.
  • U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, High Performance Schools
  • Council of Educational Facilities Planners International
    CEFPI is a professional association whose sole mission is improving the places where children learn. Through School Building Week, their High Performance Schools Symposium and more they educate and bring together educational facilities planners.
  • The Collaborative for High Performance Schools
    CHPS facilitates the design of high-performance schools through a variety of resources and links. They have developed criteria for a self-certification and recognition program for high-performance schools, which is in use in California and has been adapted for use in other states.
  • Green School Building in Action: Green Building Program of Montgomery County Public Schools, one of the largest school districts in the nation, with abundant resources on LEED implementation, green technology pilots, high-performance design training and case studies. Green building curriculum materials, educational games and user signage are available for free download.
  • The Green Building Resource: The Harvard Green Campus Initiative has developed this Green Building Resource to support the implementation of Harvard’s Green Building Guidelines and Harvard’s Sustainability Principles. The Resource is the result of seven years of work, and includes the experience and knowledge gained from 25 Harvard LEED projects.
  • Betterbricks: Case studies, resource links and other information on LEED and green schools.
  • Designing the Sustainable School, by Alan Ford: This book presents a survey of K-12 Schools from around the world that combine the best in aesthetics, sustainability and high-performance design. Also available from Amazon.com.
  • The U.S. Green Schools Foundation: This nonprofit organization is dedicated to the implementation of energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable systems and practices in K-12 schools. The foundation’s Web site has links to curriculum resources for educators in a variety of environmental topics, as well as sites for students to visit to explore concepts of green building, solar energy, wind energy, and general energy conservation topics.
  • LEEDuser: LEEDuser helps schools become LEED certified with tips and guidance on the LEED for Schools rating system, including credit-by-credit checklists, sample documentation, and user forums. LEEDuser also displays the official LEED credit language under a license from USGBC.

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Child Health Resources
  • Healthy Child Healthy World is dedicated to protecting the health and well being of children from harmful environmental exposures. We educate parents, support protective policies, and engage communities to make responsible decisions, simple everyday choices, and well-informed lifestyle improvements to create healthy environments where children and families can flourish.

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Teaching Tools and Sustainable Curriculum
  • The Cloud Institute for Sustainability Education
    The mission of the Cloud Institute is to ensure the viability of sustainable communities by leveraging changes in K-12 school systems to prepare young people for the shift toward a sustainable future. The Cloud Institute creates educational materials that inspire young people to think about the world, their relation to it, and their ability to influence it in an entirely new way.
  • Alliance to Save Energy’s Green Schools Campaign
    This program engages students in creating energy-saving activities in their schools using hands-on, real-world projects. A number of lesson plans for different age groups can be downloaded for free on this site.
  • Closing the Loop: Exploring Integrated Waste Management and Resource Conservation
    From the California Integrated Waste Management Board’s Office of Education and the Environment, Closing the Loop is a compilation of 50 lessons to help students discover and nurture an environmental ethic and stewardship for natural resources. The activities focus on solid waste and environmental awareness topics including landfills, recycling, packaging, resource conservation, waste prevention, worm composting and more.
  • School Building Week, Council of Educational Facilities Planners International
    School Building Week focuses on high-performing, healthy, safe and sustainable school facilities and their connection to learning. It includes the School of the Future student design competition, which offers middle school students an opportunity to illustrate the kind of creativity they bring to the design process.
  • K-12 Energy Lesson Plans and Activities, U.S. Department of Energy
    On this site you'll find links to more than 350 lesson plans and activities on energy efficiency and renewable energy for grades K-12. Each includes a short summary that identifies curriculum integration, time, materials, and national standards.
  • Earth Day Network — K-12 Environmental Education Program
    Earth Day Network’s Environmental Education Program provides curriculum resources, games, interactive quizzes and other tools for integrating environmental issues into core curriculum subjects.
  • Energy Kid’s Page Energy Information Agency
    This site contains energy-related materials such as history, facts, games, hands-on activities, an energy calculator and research articles for different age groups.
  • EPA Teaching Center
    The EPA Teacher Resources Web site contains curriculum and other links to help teachers educate on a variety of environmental topics, from waste and recycling to local environmental cleanup activities. Curriculum for a variety of age groups is available, including links out of the EPA Web site.
  • Florida Solar Energy Center
    The Florida Solar Energy Center has developed several environment and energy curriculum for use by teachers.
  • Green Schools Energy Project: A Step-by-Step Manual Youth for Environmental Sanity
    A simple, step-by-step guide to help students perform energy “audits” on their schools and then successfully lobby for implementation of positive changes.
  • The National Energy Education Development Project
    The NEED program includes innovative curriculum materials, professional development, evaluation tools and recognition for schools that have implemented NEED-oriented curriculum. NEED teaches the scientific concepts of energy and provides objective information about conventional and emerging energy sources —their use and impact on the environment, economy and society. NEED materials are available for all grade levels from kindergarten through high school.
  • Population Connection
    Population Connection’s Education Program is the only national, population education program with a strong emphasis on teacher training for educators of grades pre-K through 12. Population education addresses how the human race has grown and shaped the world around us. World population has quadrupled in the past century, changing the way we use natural resources and function as societies. Population education is the ultimate multi-disciplinary field; it’s ecology, human geography, anthropology, economics, biology, public health, sociology, environmental studies, history and civics all rolled into one, with a good bit of mathematics to help us understand where we’ve come from and where we might be headed.
  • Sustainability Education Handbook: A Resource Guide for K-12 Teachers Incorporating the Michigan State Framework Standards
    This Handbook has been created to help K-12 teachers understand sustainability concepts and incorporate them into their classroom. In the course of writing this Handbook, the Michigan State Framework Standards and Benchmarks have been evaluated comprehensively for opportunities to integrate sustainability concepts into your existing curriculum. Every sample activity provided in the Handbook correlates to particular state standards and benchmarks.
  • The U.S. Green Schools Foundation: This nonprofit organization is dedicated to the implementation of energy-efficient and environmentally sustainable systems and practices in K-12 schools. The foundation’s Web site has links to curriculum resources for educators in a variety of environmental topics, as well as sites for students to visit to explore concepts of green building, solar energy, wind energy, and general energy conservation topics.

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Indoor Environmental Quality – Indoor Air Quality, Mold, Children’s Health Issues
  • Tools for Schools, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
    The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Tools for Schools program has resources for the design and maintenance of schools with superior indoor air quality.
  • Green Clean Schools, Healthy Schools Campaign
    Green Clean Schools is the Healthy Schools Campaign’s national partnership to promote green cleaning in America’s schools. The initiative brings together the cleaning industry, educational leaders, parents and advocates to encourage schools to adopt environmentally friendly policies, practices and products.
  • Center for School Mold Help
    This site offers educational and scientific information about school mold and sick-building disorders related to damp buildings, established to educate the public about school mold in order to help prevent, address and end the health threat to students and school staff.
  • Collaborative for High Performance Schools, Best Practice Manual
    The Collaborative for High Performance Schools’ best practices manual contains guidelines and strategies for mold prevention in school buildings.
  • Mold in My School: What Do I Do?
    This publication from the California Department of Health Services provides information on the most important indoor mold-related health concerns, and it discusses how school districts can keep school facilities mold free and avoid these problems.
  • Mold Remediation in Schools and Commercial Buildings
    A U.S. Environmental Protection Agency document that presents guidelines for the remediation and cleanup of mold and moisture problems in schools and commercial buildings.
  • Respiratory Infections Among Children in Moisture Damaged Schools
    A study from the Collaborative for High Performance Schools aimed at finding out whether respiratory infections among school-aged children differed in schools with visible moisture and mold problems compared to non-damaged schools.
  • School Advanced Ventilation Engineering Software
    SAVES is a free software package, offered by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, that architects, engineers, school officials and others can use to determine what type of ventilation equipment provides the best advantages for their unique applications.
  • Environmental Law Institute: The Indoor Environment is a summary of selected written policies that promote green cleaning in schools. The document includes summaries of selected state laws, unenacted (proposed) state legislation, and school district policies.

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Indoor Environmental Quality – Daylighting

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Indoor Environmental Quality - Acoustics
  • ANSI S12.60-2002
    American National Standard Acoustical Performance Criteria, Design Requirements, and Guidelines for Schools.
  • Acoustical Society of America
    The Acoustical Society of America is an international scientific society dedicated to increasing and diffusing the knowledge of acoustics and its practical applications. Its Web site contains a variety of resources, including publications, standards information and links. Especially of note are the two booklets published by the ASA on classroom acoustics, which can be found at http://asa.aip.org/classroom/booklet.html and http://asa.aip.org/classroom/bookletII.pdf.
  • Air-Conditioning and Refrigeration Institute Executive Summary: ARI Classroom Acoustical Study
    In order to measure the acoustic characteristics of existing schools and estimate the financial impact of meeting the American National Standards Institute's S12.60 provisions, ARI commissioned a study to provide a survey of acoustical performance characteristics for existing classroom construction and various HVAC system types in reference to ANSI S12.60, and when classrooms did not meet the requirements of ANSI S12.60, identify the reasons.
  • Education Resources Information Center
    ERIC provides free access to more than 1.2 million bibliographic records of journal articles and other education-related materials and, if available, includes links to full text. ERIC is sponsored by the U.S. Department of Education’s Institute of Education Sciences. The site includes many studies that show the impact of acoustics on learning, both for students with hearing disabilities and others, as well as studies and papers on good acoustical design in classrooms.
  • Quiet Classrooms
    Quiet Classrooms is an alliance of nonprofit organizations working to create better learning environments in schools by reducing noise. This site is a resource for schools, school boards, parent-teacher associations, principals, parents, teachers, students and school architects.

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Energy and Atmosphere
  • EnergySmart Schools, U.S. Department of Energy
    The EnergySmart Schools site serves as a mechanism to provide education and information about energy-efficient, healthy, high-performance K-12 schools. The site includes resources for teachers, including a digitized version of the Get Smart About Energy CD-ROM, a curriculum-enhancement tool containing 350 inquiry-based lessons aligned to National Science Education Standards.
  • ENERGY STAR® for K–12 School Districts
    ENERGY STAR is a joint program of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the U.S. Department of Energy that promotes energy-efficient products and practices. This page provides resources for implementing ENERGY STAR strategies in K–12 schools.
  • Alliance to Save Energy’s Green Schools Campaign
    This program engages students in creating energy-saving activities in their schools using hands-on, real-world projects. A number of lesson plans for different age groups can be downloaded for free on this site.
  • Energy Kid’s Page Energy Information Agency
    This site contains energy-related materials such as history, facts, games, hands-on activities, an energy calculator and research articles for different age groups
  • Advanced Energy Design Guide for K-12 School Buildings
    This free publication, published by the American Society of Heating, Refrigerating and Air-Conditioning Engineers, instructs architects, engineers and others on building design teams how to use best design practices to create energy-saving buildings. A full 16 percent of schools districts’ controllable costs is spent on energy.

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Materials and Waste
  • Go Green Initiative
    The Go Green Initiative is a comprehensive environmental action plan that promotes conservation and environmental education in schools. The site contains a variety of resources for developing environmental stewardship programs and curriculum around recycling and waste issues, in addition to other environmental topics.
  • Closing the Loop: Exploring Integrated Waste Management and Resource Conservation
    From the California Integrated Waste Management Board’s Office of Education and the Environment, Closing the Loop is a compilation of 50 lessons to help students discover and nurture an environmental ethic and stewardship for natural resources. The activities focus on solid waste and environmental awareness topics including landfills, recycling, packaging, resource conservation, waste prevention, worm composting and more.

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Alternative Transportation
  • Vehicle Buyer’s Guide For Fleets
    The Clean Strategies for School Bus Fleets page of the Vehicle Buyer’s Guide for Fleets, from the U.S. Department of Energy, contains specific resources related to the use of alternative fuel in school buses. This includes the “School Bus Toolkit,” which contains case studies, reports on market and air quality and presentations that can be customized for schools’ specific needs.

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News and Publications

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