Sustainable Fieldston: How a Campus Expansion Presented an Opportunity to Build Green and Move toward Sustainability

The Ethical Culture Fieldston School (ECF) was established in 1878 by the visionary Felix Adler, educator, social reformer, and founder of the New York Society for Ethical Culture. He envisioned a broad curriculum that emphasized nonsectarian moral instruction, respect for the individual, and “learning by doing” — radical notions for the time and the very cornerstones of progressive education today. Committed to academic excellence, progressive education, and ethical learning, ECF has sustained the integrity of Adler’s original mission for more than 125 years, offering a rich and challenging curriculum in the arts, sciences, and humanities to its diverse community. It serves 1,700 students on two campuses, one in Manhattan, and the other on 18 acres in the Riverdale section of the Bronx.

Origin of Initiative

In June 2004, the Ethical Culture Fieldston School embarked on a major architectural project on its Fieldston campus in the Riverdale section of the Bronx. The bold, new plan, an outgrowth of strategic planning, included a 48,000-square-foot middle school academic building for grades six through eight; an athletic facility, with field house and pool building; and the renovation of existing spaces into a new center for performing arts, new student commons, dining hall and kitchen, and admissions suite.

School leadership recognized the need for planning to minimize the environmental effects of the construction, but more importantly, the campus expansion presented an opportunity to develop green buildings and move toward sustainability, as certified by LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design). The architect and construction team were chosen for their experience in green buildings. Our "green dean," a longtime science teacher, was brought into the process from the beginning and attended the weekly construction meeting for all three years.

Green Buildings

Building green starts with the basics: the site. The new buildings were sited primarily on previously developed areas (the gym and pool on the site of the old tennis courts, the middle school on a parking lot/hard court). As a result, of the 44,000 square feet of new footprint, only 2,000 square feet were previously undeveloped. Further, the new buildings were sited to minimize encroachment into natural habitat and nearby buildings. To achieve the goal of no net vegetation lost, more than 500 native shrubs have been planted in the past two years to enrich the woods and forest floor.

Once construction got underway, a sustainable approach continued. The stone excavated from the site was put to beautiful use on the base of the gym, pool, and middle school buildings. Over 50 percent of the building construction waste was diverted from landfills and sent to recycling facilities. More than 12 percent of building materials, by cost, contained recycled content, and more than 20 percent of building materials, by cost, were locally manufactured.

Water conservation is a hallmark of green buildings. Fieldston’s new buildings feature water-conservative plumbing — low-flush toilets that use only 1.6 gallons per flush, shower heads that shut off at 70 seconds (after three gallons), and waterless urinals that use… no water at all. The new facilities will have a profound effect on water consumption at Fieldston. At Fieldston Middle School alone, the saving is expected to be in excess of 250,000 gallons per year.

Undoubtedly, the middle school building boasts the most environmental features, from the certified wood and zinc paneling used on the exteriors to the giant cisterns in the basement that capture rainwater for use in irrigation and plant maintenance. (ECF has applied for a LEED silver certification for the middle school.) The siting of the building was designed to maximize daylight and views to the outside. The windows are operable, smart technology monitors the heating and cooling systems, and the building runs on 100 percent wind energy. The lighting fixtures are energy-efficient, and motion sensors shut off unnecessary light when rooms are vacant. To ensure indoor environmental quality, the middle school was also built with all low-emitting adhesives, sealants, paints, and coatings as well as Green Label carpets.

Green Roofs and the Curriculum

A particularly green hallmark of the middle school building is the green or vegetative roof on the new middle school. Actually, there are two, an upper and a lower or teaching roof, both covered with vegetation that provides insulation in the winter and reduces heat in the summer; it also reduces storm water runoff.

ECF is fortunate to have two scientists leading exciting research projects on both roofs. Matthew Palmer, a plant ecologist and lecturer at Columbia University, is leading a project on the lower, or teaching, roof on the feasibility of using regionally appropriate native plants on green roofs — and by "native," he means native to the city’s five boroughs. Typically, green roof vegetation is dominated by Sedum species, which are neither native nor attractive to native birds or insects. Palmer, who is interested in meshing restoration ecology with green roofs, has selected a variety of native plants that are specific to this area, some from the Hempstead Plain grasslands and others from the Rocky summit grasslands. They range from poverty oatgrass to butterfly milkweed. Use of regionally native plants increases the value of green roofs as habitat for insects and birds. "As near as I can detect," said Palmer, "most of the green roof research has been about the benefits of insulation, … but there are potentially big benefits by adding in more biology. These are next-generation questions.” A sixth grade science class has adopted part of the lower green roof for its herb planting.

Stuart Gaffin, an atmospheric physicist and research scientist at the Center for Climate Systems Research at Columbia University, is leading the project on the upper roof, which is equipped with a weather station and sophisticated real-time environmental sensors. The sensors and probes measure wind speed, rainfall, soil moisture, reflectivity, and temperature at a number of depths on the green roof, compared to a nearby white (or light-colored) roof and a black roof. “This is really a state-of-the-art system, really university research quality,” noted Gaffin, in a segment on the green roof by Eagle TV, the new student-run news show. The data will be displayed at Fieldston, accessible to students and teachers for various research projects, and shared with Columbia, which will compare the environmental performance of this green roof system with others around the city. The instrumentation on the roof was supported by a grant from the E.E. Ford Foundation.

Palmer and Gaffin along with Fieldston science teachers Howard Waldman and Kinne Stires and Fieldston green dean Peter Mott, presented a paper on “Increasing Biodiversity on a School Green Roof: Ecology and Education” at the annual Green Roofs for Healthy Cities conference in Baltimore in spring 2008.

Other Efforts: Carbon Offsetting and Earth Week

Earth Week at Fieldston Middle School was a special occasion in 2008, with many events ranging from a sustainable Fieldston t-shirt design contest to an electronics recycling drive sponsored by the student waste management club.

A sixth grade student kicked off the week by presenting an innovative opportunity to offset the carbon released by the manufacture of cell phones by buying carbon credits from a dairy farm in California. Students purchased stickers for $2.50 each to affix on their phones to show that their phones were made carbon neutral. The money collected was donated to the Gallo Dairy Farm in California, which offsets carbon emissions by preventing methane, another green gas, from being released. The methane is usually released into the atmosphere by cow manure, but instead this farm takes the carbon dioxide emitted from manure piles and uses it to generate electricity for their farm, thus gaining carbon credits. Fieldston Middle School sold 350 stickers; next year it hopes to make this an all-school program, possibly expanding it to other independent schools in the area.

Next Steps

Curriculum: Our green dean is working on the development of innovative new curriculum that will draw on the opportunities presented by the two green roofs.

Overall Sustainability Issues: During the winter of 2007-08, the ECF board of trustees voted to form a board-level task force on the environment, to examine the next steps the school should take toward environmental sustainability. We look forward to the recommendations of the task force.

Contact: Ginger Curwen
gcurwen@ecfs.org

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