Lakewood Schools Fulfilling Promises of Cost-Effective, Green Facilities

Only five schools in Cuyahoga County have been deemed green in regard to energy conservation and four of them are in Lakewood.

 and  elementary schools, along with  and  middle schools all recently received Energy Star awards for excellence in energy utilization and efficiency.  

These awards are handed out by the U.S. Department of Energy and the EPA, and it’s no easy task to earn them.

Engineers at Gardiner Trane, a local company that worked with Lakewood to install each school’s HVAC (heating ventilation & air conditioning) system and building automation controls, were hired back to gather two years worth of data to submit to the Department of Energy, GT account manager Cory Kiewatt said.

“We collected two years of utility bills and took several readings on lighting levels, crunched  percentages, tallied the number of students, teachers and staff who use the various buildings and even had to submit data on the outside environments of the schools,” Kiewatt said.

“We then entered all that information into a computer program called Dashboard to see if the schools got a high enough score to earn an award, and as we had figured, they did.”

Rick Berdine,  schools treasurer, said he was pleased because he felt the awards offer credence to the promises that were made to Lakewood’s residents to build environmentally friendly schools that wouldn’t be so operationally expensive.

“We have seen tremendous savings in heating the new schools and the ones we renovated versus the old schools,” Berdine said. “And we have kept our electrical bills from spiking. All in all, our efforts have added quite a bit of savings to our general fund.”