SPRING ISD – Spring ISD’s Gloria Marshall Elementary School had been open less than a month when the district learned that the new “green” school had already earned three prestigious recognitions, including not one, but two awards named after renowned architect William W. Caudill.
Marshall’s winning streak began when it was announced that the school had been selected for the 2011 Caudill Award, the highest honor for the planning and design of Texas public education facilities awarded at the Texas Association of School Boards’ and the Texas Association of School Administrators’ (TASA/TASB) annual convention in September.
The annual TASA/TASB Caudill Award is given to one outstanding facility that meets the criteria and demonstrates excellence in all six of the following categories: design, innovation, educational appropriateness, process of planning, sustainability and value.
Additionally, the district has been notified that the school has been selected as the PreK-12 winner of the 2011 William W. Caudill Citation in American School & University magazine’s Architectural Portfolio competition and a winner for the K-12 grouping for the Green Schools Awards to be held at the Green Schools Symposium in San Antonio in October.
“We are honored for Gloria Marshall Elementary School to receive these recognitions. The building itself is an educational tool that children can use to make learning an engaging and relevant experience in their lives. It is my hope that this school will become the prototype for the future,” said Dr. Ralph H. Draper, Spring ISD superintendent.
Marshall Elementary was designed by SHW Group to incorporate environmentally-friendly features and practices into the two-story facility, transforming an existing plan into a two-story, high-performance school, without adding any additional costs to the district’s capital budget.
The school is a rectangular building oriented with long sides facing north and south. Each classroom has natural light and the south-facing classrooms take advantage of daylight harvesting. In addition, the building is designed to have lights off in the classrooms 75 percent of the time, so each room has sensors that turn the lights on and off based on levels of natural light.
A science garden and eco-pond that includes an above-ground cistern and a water trough can be used to teach children integrated concepts about math and science that allow for real-world experiences. Under the parking lot and playgrounds is a geothermal well field that houses a system of tubes and valves that take hot and cold water in and out of the building. Through the use of a web-based learning tool, students are able to interact with the building systems and know the temperature of the water as it leaves the building and when it returns from deep in the earth.
“Marshall Elementary is an exciting facility that was designed with the learner in mind. Students not only experience energy conservation first-hand, but have opportunities to use their actual learning environment within their discovery approach curriculum,” said Kathy Morrison, Marshall principal.
Additional green features include a highly reflective white-colored roof, an on-site wind turbine, 10 kilowatts of roof-mounted photovoltaic cells (which converts sunlight directly into electricity), a butterfly garden along a walking trail, and an underground cistern that collects rainwater from the roof used to flush toilets and urinals. Also, trees from the existing site are reused as desks, benches and conference room tables and many of the construction materials were made with recycled content or rapidly renewable resources.
The school will be hosting a dedication ceremony at 9 a.m. Thursday, Oct. 20 and tours of the award-winning campus will be offered following the ceremony. The community is invited.
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