Teach Me How

摘要

Enrollment in public elementary and secondary schools rose 24 percent between 1985 and 2006, according to the National Center for Education Statistics. In 2006, nearly 50 million students were using more than 385,000 school buildings. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, in 2003, 234,000 school buildings-representing nearly 6.3 billion square feet or 63.4 percent of floorspace-were built before 1980. Forty percent of floorspace had never been renovated. From this, I conclude that the number of students keeps going up while the educational building stock keeps getting older. As a result, we are currently in the midst of a major surge in construction spending-more than $80 billion in 2007, making education the largest nonresiden-tial construction market Attending this surge is the high-performance schools movement. High-performance schools are designed to improve the learning environment with good lighting, indoor air quality, temperature, humidity and acoustics while minimizing energy, resources and cost.