Last night the Southface board of directors held their regular meeting at ANCS. Southface supports nonprofits like ANCS in understanding, designing, and implementing projects that promote responsible resource use. Over the past 9 years, ANCS has been fortunate to have been awarded three different grants from the Community Foundation for Greater Atlanta’s “Grants to Green” program to make over $1 million in energy-efficient improvements to our two historic school buildings. Solar panels to produce renewable energy, low-flow plumbing fixtures, motion-controlled LED lighting, thermal envelope insulation, and other projects completed in partnership with Southface have allowed us to greatly reduce energy and water use at both campuses.
We take great pride in being good stewards of the environment, and we appreciate recognition given to us by the U.S. Department of Education as a “Green Ribbon School”, by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency as a top ENERGY STAR performer, and by the City of Atlanta as an “Atlanta Better Buildings Challenge MVP” award winner. As a school, we strive to model for students how to take care of the world around them by conserving resources, and it goes beyond just our facilities. For example, our PTCA’s sustainability committee shares “green suggestions” from students at morning meeting, and the committee also organizes “zero waste” lunch days about once a month to draw attention to eating all of the food on our trays and being mindful of using reusable containers if packing a lunch from home. For years, ANCS has participated in the Safe Routes to School program–including earning an infrastructure improvement grant with the Georgia Department of Transportation–to encourage walking and biking to school so that fewer cars are on the streets. And in our cafeteria, our nutrition team emphasizes the use of locally-sourced produce, meats, and dairy as much as possible to reduce the energy costs associated with ordering products from distant vendors.
These efforts at reducing our energy footprint not only help us to protect the environment for our students now and into the future, but they also allow us to significantly cut our utility expenses which means we can put more dollars directly into teaching and learning. If you’d like to connect with the PTCA sustainability committee to learn more, you can do so here.