Sacramento Green Schools Initiative Gets Boost from USGBC Grant

SACRAMENTO, CALIFORNIA - February 24, 2011 - An initiative to retrofit the schools in the Sacramento Unified School District is getting a boost from a U.S. Green Building Council Grant, reports the Sacramento Bee.

The city's mayor, Kevin Johnson - a former NBA All-Star and point guard for the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Phoenix Suns - last year called for a $100 million initiative to improve the efficiency of the city's school system. Johnson wants to see the schools reduce energy and water usage by 20 percent, employing all of the clean technology that California and other innovation hubs have created in the past decades.

"We have set a lofty goal of becoming the greenest region in the country," Johnson said at a Greenwise meeting on Tuesday, the Bee reports. "And a large part of this commitment is to green our schools."

Now the U.S. Green Building Council - best known for administering the LEED certification program - is helping out with one of their first grants from a $300,000 green schools fellowship initiative, which will fund a sustainability officer who will help monitor and guide the effort. 

The renovation of about 15 million square feet of school structures will be a major task. The city could benefit from the application of spray foam insulation, which is ideally suited for retrofits and major institutional applications. 

Spray foam insulation has one of the highest R-values of any type of commercially available insulation, so using this technology could potentially save the region's schools millions of dollars in energy costs down the road. 

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