Education - News & Trends

Campaign launched to improve school furniture

STEVENAGE, U.K. –A call to action urges facilities managers, manufacturers, and education professionals to work together to improve school furnishings. The goal is to aid learning and teaching and to reduce the risk of recurrent back pain, according to the Furniture Industry Research Association (FIRA).

The British Department of Education and Skills is embarking on a 30-month project with a firm of architects researching the effect of personalized learning on the school building environment. Ten case studies will be featured and it is hoped that some of these will cover furniture schemes.

The Department of Education and Skills, and the British Educational Suppliers’ Association (BESA) measured 1400 children in three English regions, and found they were 1cm taller than they had been in a similar study a decade earlier, consistent with the growth rate of 1cm a decade found in data going back to 1970, according to a 2001 study. While the size of children is increasing, the size of the furniture they are expected to use has not changed in 50 years.

FIRA held a three month trial at the beginning of this year with Year 2 children at Wheatfield Infants and Nursery School, St Albans. Tests showed that pupils using desks with tilts of either 5° or 10° felt more than double the comfort levels of those with normal flat desks, were two or three times happier with the height of the desks and felt twice as happy.

FIRA has developed a certification scheme for school furniture, which identifies long lasting, fit for purpose products which meet and far exceeds the stipulations of EN1729. A data sheet for each certified product contains information on environmental, sustainability and quality management systems of the manufacturer, together with ratings for its performance in relation to movement, aesthetics, mobility, stackability, multiple sizes, adjustability, instructions for use and additional features, and also in tests to standard EN1729. An overall assessment rating is also given. For further information see www.fira.co.uk

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Motorola to help N.O. school

NEW ORLEANS – Motorola is beginning a project to rebuild and upgrade the broadband infrastructure and video technology capabilities at Chalmette High School in St. Bernard Parish, Louisiana, which suffered total devastation resulting from Hurricane Katrina.

Motorola presented a check for $50,000 to rebuild the school’s technology infrastructure for the 2008-2009 school year. The new Chalmette High School Lacoste Campus anticipated to open in Fall 2009 will have state-of-the-art video and high-speed data services allowing teachers and students to access rich multi-media experiences, enhancing their curriculum and studies. Motorola will also support the students and faculty at Chalmette with radios to enhance communication between faculty and administrators. For more information, see www.motorola.com

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Cleaning helps with ABCs

ALEXANDRIA, Va. – There is a correlation between a school’s cleanliness and its students’ academic achievement, according to an APPA national study of college students.

Cleanliness ranked as the fourth most important building element in affecting student learning. The first three elements were noise, air temperature, and lighting.

Of the students polled, 88% noted that lack of cleanliness can become a distraction. Fully 84% reported that they desire orderly spotlessness or ordinary tidiness to create a good learning environment. In addition, 78% reported that cleanliness affects their health, notably through allergies, germ spreading, bug and rodent infestations, and stress levels. For more information, see www.appa.org

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Teachers want to increase tech use

DENVER, Colo. – American classroom teachers currently use digital content for a small percentage of their classroom time, but teachers would prefer to use technology more often, reports a new study from Quality Education Data, Inc. (QED), an education market research and database firm, and wholly owned subsidiary of Scholastic.

State of Digital Content in America’s Classrooms, 2007-2008, asked educators about the types of digital media that they have access to in their schools and that they use in their every day instruction. The study also asked teachers to identify barriers to technology use in their classrooms and to report the most common technology-based activities in which their students participate.

Key findings include:

• 86% of teachers have desktop computers available in their classrooms; 67% of teachers have access to laptops for their students if they need them; and only 5% of teachers have no access to computers of any kind.
• 9% of teachers spend more than 50% of instructional time using technology, while 16% of report no use of technology during classroom time. 
• 85% of teachers report not having enough computers in their classroom as a barrier to using digital content, either always (23%) or sometimes (63%). 
• Nearly 95% of teachers use technology to search for free content for use in their classrooms; 36% report that they do so at least three to four times a week.
• 17% of teachers participate in online social networking. 19% of teachers participate in an online professional community.
• Students of all ages are creating multimedia presentations in school: 58% of high school students, 49% of middle school students, and 22% of elementary school students.

For more information, see www.scholastic.com

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Colleges continue to green

LEXINGTON, Ky. – Colleges and universities are broadening and deepening their sustainability efforts, according to a study by the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

More institutions of all types getting involved and campuses undertaking more significant measures than ever before to improve their sustainability performance. Of particular note is the fact that over the course of 2007, 452 presidents and chancellors committed to climate neutrality by signing the American College & University Presidents' Climate Commitment and at least 35 other colleges and universities announced their own climate commitments and energy conservation plans.

This progress is outlined in AASHE Digest 2007, a 230-page report includes more than 800 stories about higher education institutions leading the way to a sustainable future. Chapters cover education, research, campus operations, administration, and finance. For more information, see www.aashe.org

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EPA goes to school

IOWA CITY, Iowa. – The University of Iowa (UI) became a Green Power Partner with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

The UI is meeting a green power commitment to the EPA by burning oat hulls in place of coal, generating approximately 10 million kilowatt-hours of green power. The oat hulls make up more than 18% of the fuel consumed in the UI's power heating plants.

The UI is among the top three participating Big Ten schools in the EPA's College & University Green Power Challenge and places the Big Ten conference among the top three conferences nationally. To view the national rankings, see www.epa.gov

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USGBC does the ABCs

WASHINGTON, D.C. – The U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has launched a website to give students, parents, teachers, school administrators, elected officials, and community members an important resource in the effort to ensure a future of green schools for every child within a generation.

Build Green Schools is filled with facts on the benefits and costs of green schools, including the ways green schools foster learning, decrease student and teacher absenteeism from respiratory and other illnesses, reduce energy and water bills, and provide models for teaching the world’s future leaders about sustainability to benefit communities for generations to come. It is complete with profiles of schools that have already gone green, examples of policies governments and school districts have instituted to ensure future schools are green, a list of resources and links, and a social networking site for visitors to share their experiences, best practices, and creative ideas.

A 2006 study sponsored by the American Federation of Teachers, the American Institute of Architects, the American Lung Association, the Federation of American Scientists and USGBC found that building green would save an average school $100,000 each year in energy costs along – enough to hire two new additional full-time teacher, purchase 5,000 new textbooks, or buy 500 new computers.

Green schools have a superior indoor environment, with clean, fresh air, free of dangerous chemicals from everyday products like carpets, paints, and cleaning materials. They make use of as much natural daylight as possible, maximizing students’ ability to concentrate and stay physically and emotionally healthy while at the same time dramatically reducing energy costs and greenhouse gas emissions. On average, green schools use 33% less energy and 32% less water than conventional schools, which would bring the U.S. closer to reducing reliance on imported energy.

Green schools’ better lighting, temperature control, ventilation, and indoor air quality contribute to reduced asthma, colds, flu, and absenteeism, helping improve learning, test scores, and lifetime student earnings. Greening all school construction would also create more than 2,000 new jobs each year from increased use of energy-efficient technologies. And green schools boost morale and improve teacher retention.

The USGBC’s LEED® (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) for Schools green rating system provides green-building guidelines and offers third-party verification to ensure schools’ stakeholders that their buildings incorporate the best in science, design and technology to make their schools truly green. For more information, see www.buildgreenschools.org

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Colleges to study sustainability

LEXINGTON, Ky. – The Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) has launched a pilot rating system for sustainability in higher education.

More than 90 college and university campuses will test the self-assessment tool, called STARS (Sustainability Tracking, Assessment, and Rating System). Over the course of 2008 they will provide feedback to AASHE and inform STARS version 1.0, planned for release in spring 2009.

The 90-plus participating campuses represent a wide range of institutional types, sizes, and geography. They include public and private schools, community colleges, and research universities.
STARS is designed to:

• Help gauge the progress of colleges and universities toward sustainability in all sectors, from governance and operations to academics and community engagement.
• Enable meaningful comparisons across institutions as well as benchmarking within institutions.
• Create incentives for continuous improvement toward sustainability.
• Facilitate information sharing about sustainability practices and performance in higher education
• Build a stronger, more diverse campus sustainability community.

Given the rapid growth of sustainability initiatives at institutions of higher education in North America, measuring and assessing progress toward sustainability goals has become increasingly important. While many institutions have undertaken sustainability assessments and while a variety of assessment tools are available, there is currently no system that translates disparate sustainability indicators into a single metric that enables both institutional benchmarking and easy comparison across a large number of campuses in terms of overall level of achievement.

The system is similar to the LEED (Leadership in Energy Environmental Design) green building rating system. STARS, however, is applied to an entire campus rather than a single building or set of buildings and evaluates social responsibility as well as environmental stewardship.

Using STARS, campuses may earn credits in three categories: 1) Curriculum and Research, 2) Operations, and 3) Administration and Finance. Within each category are subsections of credits, ranging from “purchasing” and “buildings” in Operations to “investment” and “planning” in Administration and Finance.
For information about STARS, including a copy of the Guide, see www.aashe.org

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