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Our second speaker is an individual who utilized NEED and other resources and adapted them
to create a unique student-led effort in Fayette County Public Schools. It’s my pleasure
to introduce Tresine Logsdon. Tresine is the Energy and Sustainability Curriculum Coordinator
for Fayette County Public Schools where she helps schools measure and raise awareness
about energy consumption, design and implement school improvement projects, and conduct projects
related to air, water and soil quality. She is a 12-year veteran educator, most recently
at Henry Clay High School in Lexington where she taught AP environmental science and biology.
Tresine serves as the science content specialist for Kentucky Virtual High School and teaches
AP environmental science and biology there as well. Finally, Tresine designs and facilitates
online professional development for Kentucky science teachers through e-Learning Kentucky.
At this time I will turn the controls over to Tresine for her presentation.
Thank you, Erika. What I’m going to talk about today is what we have done here in Fayette
County in one year. This program called E=USE2 (Education leads to Understanding Sustainability,
Energy and the Environment) is brand spanking new. We just really wrapped up E=USE2 in Fayette
County in the last two or three weeks. It is changing practically on a daily basis.
It will be modified quite a bit before we start school in the fall.
My story is really going to be how we got where we are, how the year went, what we actually
did, and areas of growth, areas of improvement that we have moving forward. So E=USE2 is
an 8-step program. Having been a teacher and sponsor of the Go Green Club at Henry Clay
High School, I was intimately familiar with the Kentucky Green & Healthy Schools program.
While at Henry Clay, we became the first high school in Kentucky to complete all the categories
of Kentucky Green & Healthy Schools in May of 2009. In May of 2010 Henry Clay was the
first high school to be a model KGHS school. So I was very intimately familiar with KGHS.
When changing hats, in this new capacity of Energy and Sustainability Curriculum Coordinator,
I knew that I wanted to approach our teachers in Fayette County with a program that was
easy to follow – that had some beginnings and some ends. We have 55 schools in Fayette
County and I wanted to reach as many schools as I could. This was my vehicle for doing
that. There’s a lot to be said for implementing NEED and energy curriculum across the board
and all of your schools in your districts. What I’m going to talk about though is the
team model. It is really important to understand that along with the team model, it’s critical
to make sure that you don’t neglect the fact that the energy curriculum content is
being taught. There are only so many students that the team can reach, especially if your
team is as small as five or six students; which really is as Karen said a model that
probably works the best. Now, what the teams look like in our schools
this year varies greatly. In elementary schools, it was sometimes as small as a team of five
or six students. Most of the time in elementary schools the team, the E=USE2 team, which was
defined by the teachers and the administrators that were interested in implementing E=USE2.
Most of the time looks like an entire grade level – so an entire fourth grade or an
entire fifth grade. I would implement E=USE2 by visiting each of our schools once a month
and progressing them through this 8-step program. In a tight, tight nutshell the way I want
to describe E=USE2 is that it holds schools hands through the Kentucky Green & Healthy
Schools program, the NEED Youth Awards for Energy Achievement program, and lots of other
things thrown in. That’s kind of in a tight nutshell how I describe E=USE2.
In middle schools, the team typically was a science class, maybe two or three science
classes that would meet together when they visit the library. In high school it varied
- our five high schools - from an after school environmental club to a freshman civics class
to a senior AP environmental science class. The look and feel of our teams here in Fayette
County right now is very different, because it was essentially whoever the teacher wanted
to involve as part of E=USE2. What you see before you are the 8 steps. I’m
just going to, as briefly as I can, go through each of these steps. Before I do that, I think
it’s important that if you are an energy manager, if you’re trying to start school
teams in your school district, it is imperative that you of course get your district administration
on board and make sure they are in the loop and understand what your goals are and your
vision, and of course all the advantages and benefits that they’re going to reap as a
result of all these energy teams. It also needs to be in writing. I think all of our
districts now in Kentucky have an energy plan. Here in Fayette County we have a Sustainability
Council made up of stakeholders, representatives from a wide swath in our district. That Sustainability
Council has developed a sustainability plan. In that plan is the implementation of E=USE2.
So that helps to validate our message and helps to promote our message. It goes a long
way in helping us get accomplished what we really want to accomplish. I really encourage
you to try to get on paper, as part of your district energy plan, the goals that you have
for your energy team. Step 1 is forming a team. Ideally, what I
was hoping our energy team will look like this year you see on the top. That’s not what happened
the vast majority of the time this year, as hopefully what we’re going to be working
for. Ideally, I’d like to see us as a smaller team of students, custodians coming to our
meeting, parents coming to our meetings, administrators, community partners, and having a stipend for
all the teachers. Now, I think this stipend is a critical piece of implementing energy
teams in your schools. In Fayette County, I basically went to them a couple of months
into this job and said I really feel like we need to have stipends. The district administration
basically said to choose the first 16 or so schools you believe will complete all eight
steps and we can provide them with a small stipend. Next year we’re going to provide
all of our E=USE2 teachers stipends. It is tiny, it is a very small $300 stipend, but
it’s something. You know for teachers who are accustomed to doing so much for free,
you don’t really go into teaching for the money, just having a little something to let
them know that this is something the district values goes a really long way with teachers.
So that is something that I think is very important. In reality, my teams were very
large. I enjoyed and appreciated the fact that I was able to touch as many kids as I
was this past year, but it had its challenges for sure.
Step 2 is all about energy assessment – helping the teams to understand how energy is used
in their school building. We talk about trying to do this on the sly. Now what a problem
there. Each time I visit one of our schools, we have about 32 of our 55 schools participate
in some capacity in E=USE2. Each time I went to visit them each month for about an hour,
I would try to throw in content not just on energy, but sustainability as a whole. Obviously
energy is our priority, our top priority in Fayette County. But we also try to take as
broad an approach as we can, with just sustainability concepts. So having been a teacher, I would
try to invest as much time as I could teaching content. This particular step, E=USE2 teams
would implement 4 different energy assessments: plug load study, KGHS Energy Inventory, a
secret audit, and foot candle light level survey. So you see the top left-hand picture
of students using the foot candle meter. The right-hand picture you see the kilowatt meter
being used for plug load study. The bottom picture looks like they’re filling out the
secret audit. These assessments are NEED documents that we use for our secret audit and plug
load survey. Step 2 is all about measuring how energy is used. I, of course, explain
to the kids that unless you understand where you are in your energy consumption, unless
you can measure that, then it’s very difficult to measure your improvement which is ultimately
our main goal. Step 3 is all about raising awareness. I tell
the kids that now we know how energy is used, you have an authentic, accurate baseline about
energy’s use, now we want the rest of the world and the whole school community on board.
I tell them that regardless of how large the team is, in some cases an entire grade level,
regardless of how large your school’s E=USE2 team is you can’t do it alone. Everyone
must get on board. Everyone must understand that this is a school-wide initiative and
that you all are the leaders. You have to lead the school; you can’t have this all
on your shoulders. The four things that our teams do for step
3 to raise awareness are: disseminate the light switch faceplate stickers that you see
in the bottom right-hand corner. It’s a little red sticker that you see all over our
school district in most of our schools. It says “your finger has the power to conserve
energy.” They also use patrol Post-its as you see in the top left-hand picture. We have
“thank you patrol Post-its” and then we have “Oops! Patrol Post-its.” They use
these for their monthly patrols, using the very same form that they use for their secret
audit in Step 2. They use the same form, so they are really able to graph, measure, and
analyze that data to see what kind of improvement and measure our progress.
Also for step 3, every school makes an energy awareness poster. At the end of the year in
mid to early April the printing office in the downtown district office makes copies
of every school’s poster. Then at our awards ceremony the first week of May, I gave each
school a copy of every school’s poster. In the bottom left-hand picture you see some
kids from Morton Middle School in front of where they displayed most of the posters that
came from our schools. Also on that picture if you’re looking at the bottom right-hand
part of that display, you’ll see an oversized check. That’s a reward check we gave to
each of our schools who participated. It wasn’t a large reward check; physically it was large,
but fiscally it wasn’t really that big – about $200 or $300 if they completed all 8 steps
in E=USE2. In the top right-hand corner you see a classroom
checklist, again something, I’m pretty sure, that came from NEED that our schools used.
Also, each school makes an energy awareness video that they post online for everybody
to see. In the middle of the slide is one of our high schools, Henry Clay High School’s
energy awareness poster. Step 4 is Design/Implement School Improvement
projects. There are really two main parts to step 4. The first one is applying for up
to a $800 school improvement project grant from Kentucky Green & Healthy Schools. It
requires you to complete what they call the smart form and of course the grant application
and then implementing that project. That’s the biggest part of Step 4. Another part of
Step 4 is students implementing the Change the World, Start with Energy Star pledge drive
which is something we have done through NEED. You see there are a couple of students from
Athens-Chilesburg Elementary standing in front of a poster of Change the World, Start with
Energy Star. That is just a pledge drive where they solicit pledges from parents and community
members and teachers who sign a pledge to conserve energy at home and at school.
So, with grants up to $800, we had about $14, 500 in funds to utilize through the Kentucky
Green & Healthy Schools for these projects. Our most popular projects were: LED exit signs,
several schools purchased LED exit signs to replace the incandescent ones they had in
their building;. the VendingMiser that you heard Karen mention earlier; timed power strips
which were a real crowd-pleaser with our teachers; CFLs; we had a couple of schools that purchased
bike racks; we had a few schools that purchased trees to plant - deciduous trees to put on
the south side of their building. So with Step 4 really the focus was on Design and
Implement a School Improvement project along with Change the World, Start with Energy Star.
Step 5 is a step that I am completely restructuring through this fall. I’m still kind of in
the throes of fleshing this out; but I want Step 5 to focus on STEM. If you’re an educator
in science or math, you know that STEM stands for science, technology, engineering and math.
There’s going to be a huge focus on the new science centers that are going to be coming
out in the next 18 months or so. I think it is really important to mirror those, too.
The potential for integrating STEM in energy education and sustainability and environmental
education the potential is huge. It is just ripe for all kinds of opportunities for students
to use the data that they have collected, to analyze it, to graph it, to measure it
- the monthly patrols, the candle light meters, the plug loads that they do, comparing their
data of months and months to their baseline. This is an area that I did not do a very good
job of this year. Many of our schools did not start E=USE2 until close to Christmas,
so many of them did not even get to Step 5 before the end of the year. This year Step
5 was sort of hodgepodge for a few things; but this coming year, hopefully we’ll have
a huge chunk of our schools starting in the fall. We’ll be able to really get a lot
of STEM education to our students through the E=USE2. Now we’ve had some very early
preliminary discussions with UK’s College of Education, UK’s College of Engineering
to help us with this, specifically the Center for Applied Energy Research out at UK to help
us with this. We’re still fleshing that out. I would encourage anyone who is in a
position to partner with post-secondary institutions to definitely do that.
Our focus in Step 5 is going to be on analyzing our data and graphing our data. Also, Renovation
101 Teams and Living Labs Teams, we’ll talk about that a little bit later, that definitely
nails STEM in lots of different ways. Step 6 is really having schools sort of step
back and take a comprehensive inventory of not just what the E=USE2 team has done in
terms of awareness and projects and measurement, but also with what the entire school has done.
Because there are very often electronic recycling, aluminum can recycling, energy conservation,
water quality, solid waste initiatives in the school that are already going on that
certainly relate to energy that the E=USE2 team hasn’t necessarily been responsible
for. So for Step 6 ask the team to set back and we talk about the inventory of what’s
been going on in that school. With that information we prioritize it and they create a portfolio,
which highlights what that school has done over the school. That portfolio is submitted
to me as part of the NEED Youth Awards for Energy Achievement. This year we had 21 schools,
I believe, who submitted portfolios up from, I think, we’ve had only one submitted before.
So we’re really, really proud of our schools and our showing in that program.
Step 7 is another step that is going to be restructured quite a bit between this year
and next year, so I’m still fleshing that out as well. I would like Step 7 to be “So
What Does All This Mean?” We’ve been really busy measuring, really busy analyzing the
data, really busy designing many projects; so at this point, why did we, what does all
this mean, what’s the benefit of all this, what is the local, the global, the fiscal,
the environmental impact of all the things that we have been doing? This is also an opportunity
for some of our schools to implement no-idling initiatives. We have one school doing that
now, partnering with the state Division of Air Quality and Earth Day Network to implement
those no-idling initiatives of things that they were going to do when the weather is
warmer. So around Step 7 would be an idle time to do that. Earth Day is going to tend
to fall right around the time that schools are getting to Step 7, so we want to get an
Earth Day activity. I’m not sure if you all are familiar with It’s My Environment,
but it’s a really neat little program where schools just video someone or a group of students
from your school holding a sign that says It’s My Environment and a large video is
made from schools from all over the nation. It is posted on Earth Day, so really a neat
activity. The 10:10:10 Challenge is something we had 14 schools participate in this year.
It was part of Step 5 of E=USE2 this year. The 10:10:10 Challenge is out of the Kentucky
EPA. When schools take the 10:10:10 Challenge they are committing to try to reduce their
energy consumption, water consumption, and solid waste disposal by 10% over the next
three years. We hope to have a lot of help for Step 5 from CAER – the Center for Applied
Energy Research, specifically an energy club that they’re starting at UK.
Step 8 is the step that we are really just coming off of right now, and it is the “funnest”
for sure. So as I mentioned earlier, we had 21 schools participate in the NEED Youth Awards
for Energy Achievement this year. We had, I think, 38 schools who have participated
in Kentucky Green & Healthy Schools in some capacity. We were able to take a couple of
busloads to Frankfort Convention Center for the KGHS Award Ceremony last week. Those top
pictures that you see there are a couple of our schools. We had 12 or 13 schools go to
Frankfort with us. The top left-hand picture is a picture of Ashland Elementary. Ashland
was the recipient of the Most Outstanding Rookie Project Award from NEED. The top right-hand
picture is Dixie Elementary. They were a recipient of the Most Outstanding Primary Division of
the NEED Youth Awards for Energy Achievement. The Fayette County school district also was
honored by NEED. There will be a team from Dixie, Ashland, Morton Middle School and a
small delegation from the district traveling to Washington D.C. national recognition ceremony
this summer – which will be the first time that anyone from Fayette County has ever gone.
This generated a lot of enthusiasm. I can’t emphasize enough the importance of recognition
celebration and reward. Some teachers and administrators and some of your schools you
will find will take or leave recognition and reward. Some teachers and schools and administrators
will do whatever it takes to get recognition and reward. So I thought it was really important
that there be stipends for the teachers. In the bottom right-hand picture you see a trophy
that rotated to a different elementary, middle, and high school once a month. There were able
to keep it in their front office for anyone to see. It just says E=USE2 at the top for
exemplary sustainability. The checks that we gave them at the end were large enough
for them to be able to display. Our goal was for our schools to gain recognition from their
school community. We want their parents to understand and be proud - understand what
their schools have done - because that is what will get parents on board. If parents
are excited, if schools are rewarded and celebrated and recognized, parents want to jump on that
band wagon, as well as community stakeholders and district administration. For recognition,
celebration and reward Kentucky NEED and KGHS have gone a really long way in shedding a
lot of light and attention on what we’ve done this year through their awards process.
That has just been huge for us. Some of our recent accomplishments this year,
as I mentioned - the FCPS Most Outstanding Project in the district division. We had two
schools who received Most Outstanding Project, Ashland and Dixie. We had 38 schools participating
in KGHS. Just recently in a board meeting, two nights ago, we were awarded the KEEPS
Stewardship Award. We have formed a Bluegrass Youth Sustainability Council, which is the
first of its kind in the state. It’s a council made up of 4 to 5 high school students from
each of our 5 public high schools and 3 private schools. It really just formed in March and
it has been remarkable what they have been able to accomplish just in the last two months.
I’m very excited about what that will evolve into in the fall next year. Locust Trace AgriScience
Farm is going to be our first Net Zero and Net Water Waste school. It’s going to be
a fully functional, sustainable agfarm and that is a hugely exciting project in Fayette
County. Wellington Elementary is going to have the greenest design full day school of
many of our schools. They were awarded the New KGHS Flag at the Frankfort grand ceremony
last week. I think it’s the third in the state that’s received that. So we are very,
very proud of that. Then also, we’ve just recently been awarded EPA Indoor Air Quality
Great Start Award. Other things that we have going on. In addition
to E=USE2 which took up the vast majority of my time, other things that we have that
have started this year and will continue in the fall are: The Youth Urban Tree Corps - we
train several high school students to be junior arborists – to go to our more urban, land-locked
schools where there is not a lot of trees to do site selection, tree planting, and maintenance.
No Idling Campaign, we talked about that a little bit.
Renovation 101 Teams, we have on average about 6 schools that are being renovated at any
given time and we want to create Renovation 101 Teams. We dipped our toe in that a little
bit this year, but we’re really going to expand to all of our schools that are in renovation
in the fall. This is going to be asking the students to meet with the design team, the
engineers and architects about once a month. These architects and engineers, along with
our Energy and Sustainability Manager Britney Thompson who is kind of the technical expert
in what we do, will help translate and interpret these graphs and charts to our students. Again,
really bringing in a lot of the STEM focus and these students will get tours of their
renovation and be the liaison between the design team and faculty and between the design
team and what’s going on with renovation with parents; Living Lab Teams – we’re
going to pilot that with Wellington Elementary and we’re just are really now starting to
flesh that out, but we want to capitalize on the sustainable features of that campus
– permeable pavement, reusable rainwater, we have some PV cells, we have a lot of day
lighting, so a lot of sustainable features in that school and we’re going to make sure
to capitalize on that. Bluegrass Youth Sustainability Council I mentioned.
Campus Composting is going on in many of our schools. We have lots of Rain Gardens. Really
exciting Community Garden partnerships in our schools. We have Carpooling going on and
Stream Restoration. Britney and I have done a lot of Faculty Meeting Presentations which
again I think is extremely important. If you have your teachers on board, then you’re
going to extend your reach and get so much more done. Quite a few seniors within our
high schools are focusing their Mentoring Projects on energy in some capacity. Britney
and I and some of our community partners are helping with that.
Really I have discovered that one of the biggest benefits that I can provide our schools is
just networking - within FCPS, letting our schools understand what’s going on in our
other schools and what opportunities there are and what services we can provide within
FCPS and then all these other organizations that are in Lexington or state organizations
or state groups that have something to offer our school. I just basically serve as kind
of a liaison between our schools, among our schools, and all the different organizations.
I think that this really helps bring together those that need and those that can offer to
meet those needs. Britney has done a great job working with
our cafeteria and hopefully we’re going to be working with our maintenance staff this
summer. Again, critical stakeholders to have as part of this conversation.
Just recently this week we started School Garden Coalition so that we can share best
practices, challenges , and successes among gardens in all of our schools – not just
vegetable community gardens, but rain gardens, herb gardens, and sensory gardens and all
kinds of gardens. If you’re in education you know that gardens are becoming huge, there’s
just a great deal of enthusiasm out there for gardens. So we want to try to capitalize
on that and support that as much as we can. So there is lots of room for improvement here
at Fayette County because we are pretty new at this. We have a long list of things that
we hope to improve on as we start the year again in the fall. One of our top priorities
is to use the monthly energy consumption data from each of our schools every month. Make
sure those schools have access to that data and then reward, or at least recognize, our
schools for reduced energy consumption and having winners at each elementary, middle,
and high school. So that is it, probably our number one priority.
Teacher’s Corner that we have on our website, we need to have a little more resources available
for our teachers. Water usage is an area that we dipped our toe in this year, but we really
have a lot more that we can do with that in creating community partnerships. School summary
report, wrapping it all up with the students is something that I want to improve a whole
lot through E=USE2 next year. Community partnering organizations - this is something that takes
a lot of time, but I hope to have the time to devote to that more next year and have
at least one business partner for each one of our E=USE2 schools.
The NEED curriculum is a fantastic curriculum. Their kits are extremely applicable, useful
and engaging. I need to do a better job of finding out where in FCPS that curriculum
is, how it’s being implemented, where those kits are and promote that.
I think we have a long way to go to be where we could be for green design in school buildings,
but it’s going to take time. We’re heading in the right direction, but we have a lot
of room for growth in that area. Indoor air quality is an area which is being addressed
by our sustainability plan that we need to address some more.
That is it. Our website is www.sustainability.fcps.net. On our website you can find out a lot more
about what’s going on in our district as well as finding contact information for Britney
Thompson and myself. And that’s it. Erika Wolfe: Okay, great. Thanks, Tresine.
And I just want to send some kudos out to Tresine and Britney Thompson, the Energy Manager
there at Fayette County. They were the second district in Kentucky to receive the KEEPS
Stewardship Award. They’re really a great example of how to bring the concept of energy
efficiency to life and we’re really happy that Tresine was on the call today.
Karen and Tresine have really demonstrated that successful district energy programs can
come from connecting individual energy efficiencies. By involving teachers, students and staff
you can create a sustainable energy program that is built upon your district’s unique
strengths and experiences. As the KEEPS staff continues to meet with districts across Kentucky,
we have repeatedly seen that districts most successful with energy management are those
that take the time to create a program that is relevant to their district and their community.
So now we’re going to begin answering some questions submitted by the audience. As a
reminder you can submit questions in the question section of the control panel on the upper
right of your screen. Karen, are you still on the call or have you caught your flight?
I think Karen is offline. Tresine, I’m assuming your still on. We’re going to keep you audio
un- muted so you can just answer the questions as they come. The first one for Tresine is
“what was your biggest challenge in the district and how did you overcome it?”
There were a slew of them and the biggest challenge changed practically on a monthly
basis really. I’ll be honest – when I first, before the school started this year
I laid in bed at night thinking “How an I going to manage all of these schools wanting
to be a part of what I have to offer?” Because that’s I think how I would have felt as
a teacher. That was not the problem. My problem was not so much managing and handling all
the interest as much as it was getting my foot in the door at some of the schools. Having
been a high school teacher in Fayette County for quite some time high schools were no problem,
middle schools weren’t that big of a deal. It was our 33 elementary schools where I really
didn’t have a lot of personal connections. Even just teaching little people was a real
steep learning curve for me – that was a challenge all by itself – kind of getting
acclimated to that. So just getting my foot in the door. What would have helped that tremendously,
in retrospect, would have been having the district let the school directors, the high
school directors, the elementary school directors, letting the people on the instructional side
know that this was an initiative that was highly valuable. That’s just hugely important.
Karen mentioned that. It’s just something that has got to be a number one priority because
you will do a lot more work and not get as far without that visible support from your
district administration than if you just got their visible support in the beginning. That
was probably my biggest trouble initially. Okay, great. Thank you.
Thank you, Tresine. I have a question for you, and this is Patrick Metz speaking from
KEEPS. You mentioned that you had 21 energy teams and I imagine that would be a challenge
in balancing those energy teams in that you have teachers that help you. You had mentioned
the necessity of having a stipend and you mentioned that you had a $300 amount for teachers
that were involved. You also mentioned non-monetary. What examples can you give of non-monetary
stipends or incentives to get teachers engaged and involved and help with the running of
the school teams.? Tresine Logsdon: That is a really good question.
We had 31 schools doing E=USE2 in some capacity – and 21 of them participated. We had 31
schools, it’s an overwhelming prospect or to be honest is going to fall if I continue
to implement it like I did this current year going to every school every month. So getting
teachers engaged and getting them to take on more ownership of it is central. It’s
critical, it’s a have-to. My teachers that I work with are my number one top priority.
If they need something from me I respond to them as quickly as possible. Just letting
teachers know that you value them is huge. Letting them know that you are here to help
them and that you understand. Having come from the classroom, I was able to really empathize
and identify with all the things they were being asked to do in being an E=USE2 team
leader as “one more thing.” Recognition can go a very long way. Some of the ways that
we did that we the trophy that I talked about earlier. Just recognizing the teacher that
I’m working with during faculty meetings, sending out emails to their administrators
and principals and CCing them, commending them on what they’re doing and their commitment
– those are really, they’re just really kind of small things that really go a long
way to helping a teacher feel motivated. Now you’re going to have some teachers that
are so intrinsically motivated on the idea of energy conservation and environmental education
that it doesn’t really matter what you do. But most teachers are so overwhelmed and have
so many things vying for their attention and their time and their focus that you really
do kind of have to go out of your way. In a nutshell, it’s just showing them and proving
to them that you’re going to do whatever you can to make their lives easier - which
is why I ended up going to every school once a month and delivering the content. Now with
most of those teachers I have a really, really good relationship with and several of them
I think will be able to step up in E=USE2 this coming fall.
Thank you, Tresine. Another question for you came in here – “What is the most interesting
or inspiring idea or action that came from a student team or group of students?”
Well, there’s a slew of them. Most recently we had a really cool garden initiative, partnership
between some African refugees we have in the community and Cassidy Elementary School. That’s
very cool. With respect to energy, we’ve had some teams do some really great energy
open houses and expos. You know I’d probably have to put some thought into that and reflect
on it a little bit more. Really every single week, I was inspired. It doesn’t take a
lot to be inspired when you’re working with as many kids as I get to work with. It happened
every single day. Some of our most low-performing urban schools would have the most enthusiastic
students. In fact there was one school, one of our lowest performing schools, and their
very small team made a fantastic energy awareness video. It was fantastic. It really mirrored
the kind of music and theme that they are accustomed to. I showed that video to practically
every school that I worked with this year. It was shown at our district awards ceremony.
I believe it was also shown at the KGHS/NEED recognition summit last week. The newspaper
did an article on that particular school. They were extremely inspiring to work with
every time that I got to see them. Thanks, Tresine. Well, I’m going to start
wrapping up. Unfortunately, we are out of time. I do want to tell you about our next
webinar in the KEEPS series. It’s titled “Beyond Awareness: Setting a Goal and Creating
an Action Plan.” The speakers will be Superintendent and Energy Manager from Bellevue Independent
Schools and the Energy Manager from Fayette County Public Schools. As previously discussed,
creating a program that speaks to your district’s unique needs is really imperative to its success.
This webinar will provide information about how you can determine a realistic energy reduction
goal for your district. You’ll hear from your cohorts about how they developed an action
plan that was more than just a piece of paper that was written and then filed away. Instead,
it is a working, living document that helped them set priorities, guide their actions,
and produce results. “Beyond Awareness: Setting a Goal and Creating an Action Plan
for Achievement” will be held on June 8 at 2:00 p.m. To register visit the KEEPS website
at www.kppc.org/KEEPS and click on the Calendar of Events tab.
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