Zellwood school now serving as Orange district’s ‘green’ model
ZELLWOOD — If you want to see the future of Orange County school campuses, look to the rural northwest corner.
District leaders point to Zellwood Elementary, which serves less than 700 students in a far-flung community with a rich farming history, as an example of the type of ecofriendly campus they’d like to build more of.
The school has a reflective white roof to help cut electricity costs and shield students and staff from Florida’s notorious heat. Solar panels power the systems that heat water for the kitchen. Sensors automatically turn off lights when nobody is in the room.
Since the campus was rebuilt five years ago, the district has replicated many of these features in other new schools, said Lauren Roth, a spokeswoman for the district. The district says its schools have received $2 million in utilities rebates as a result, including $115,354 for Zellwood.
Students and staff have embraced the “green” image too, with a dedicated group of 20 students who meet twice a week before classes start to run the school’s recycling program and dream up ad campaigns that encourage parents not to leave their cars idling in the parking lot.
Rather than focusing on expensive initiatives such as powering entire campuses by solar panels, district leaders say they’ve focused on “lowhanging fruit” — inexpensive features that easily can be incorporated on school campuses. Zellwood was chosen as a model for Orange’s “green” schools after the campus was selected for a grant of about $40,000 from the nonprofit U.S. Green Building Council. The cost of adding these features at Zellwood was minimal, according to the district.
Along with the Colonial High School Ninth-grade Center, Zellwood is among two public schools in the county that are LEED certified, a designation that indicates electricity cost savings, lower carbon emissions and healthier environments.
Trinity Prep Middle School in Winter Park, a private school, and Midway Elementary in Sanford also have that designation, according to the
U.S. Green Building Council’s website.
Sunlight flooded through wall-to-ceiling windows in Zellwood’s main stairwell on a recent morning, a hallmark of LEED certified spaces, which tend to have lots of natural light.
Zellwood uses a thermal energy storage system to store ice created by chillers run at night, when electricity is less expensive, allowing the chillers to run less during the day. Six other Orange schools now have similar systems, Roth said.
Environmental advocates have pushed for buildings to produce “zero net energy,” which means their total energy consumption is counteracted by generating renewable energy each year. A few schools nationally have done it, but Orange County estimates the changes to the school design would
add $3 million to the cost of building a school like Zellwood and it would take years to recoup those dollars through energy savings.
Teacher Nicolle Pantazoglou, who works with gifted and Exceptional Student Education students, has spearheaded efforts to inspire Zellwood students to be as green as their campus.
On a recent morning, she led a class of secondgraders outside so they could view the solar panels. They talked about how the panels heat the water that the school uses for cooking and washing dishes.
She’s organized a group of fourth- and fifth-graders known as the “Green Eagles,” who lead the school’s recycling program and create advertising about environment-saving steps.
The students are passionate about their work because they feel like they’re “saving the world,” Pantazoglou said.
Case in point: Chase Castiglione, 11, who helps pick up recycling from classes.
“We definitely don’t goof around because we know this is an important job,” he said.
The fifth-grader said he’s also persuaded his family to make changes at home — at his urging, his mom purchased another recycling bin.
And that’s what Pantazoglou said she likes to hear. She knows she’s done her job when her students are “annoying” their parents about small steps like turning off lights when they leave a room. She wants students to know the planet is in their care.
“That’s my main focus,” she said, “That they see the value of the Earth under their feet and the beauty in the things that our school provides that help us protect those things.”