Western Reserve Academy and Hathaway Brown will co-host an Energy Efficiency and Sustainability Symposium on April 11 at 2 p.m.
The symposium, co-sponsored by WRA’s Sustainability Initiative and Hathaway Brown’s Center for Sustainability, will be held in WRA’s Knight Fine Arts Center. It is open to upper-level school administrators, building managers, business officers and board members from Northeast Ohio schools.
The event will feature a panel presentation by experts in the field of energy efficiency and sustainability, including Michele Kilroy, executive director of the Northeast Ohio Chapter of the U.S. Green Building Council; Gene Matthews, director of facilities at Case Western Reserve University; Tim Stearns, senior energy consultant at Efficiency Smart; and Carolyn Watkins, office chief for the Ohio Environmental Protection Agency.
“Our goal for this event is to get heads of schools, business managers and directors of facilities together for a brass tacks meeting on energy efficiency and sustainability,” said Matt Peterson, sustainability co-coordinator at WRA. “Our school leaders can and should move the needle on sustainability. By getting some of the region’s school leaders together with experts in areas of green-building, energy efficiency, green-cleaning and more, officials can participate in the conversation and gain practical skills to save money while striving to deliver on their social contract.”
In addition to the panel presentation, there will be an opportunity for an open discussion with representatives from the Northeast Ohio Regional Sewer Water District, Cuyahoga County Solid Waste District; Cuyahoga County Department of Public Works’ pesticide-free initiative, and Kent State University’s green cleaning initiative.
With all the challenges facing the environment, it is important for schools to take the lead in making a difference.
“We are faced with a multiplicity of environmental challenges – climate change, threats to water resources and environmental toxins, just to name a few,” said Torrey McMillan, director of Hathaway Brown’s Center for Sustainability. “Each of these has real and profound consequences for business strategy, human health, and the long-term viability of our social and environmental systems. As educational institutions, we have the power to shape the next generation of leaders. Students are such superb observers of the world around them, and they learn as much or more through their observations of the way things are done in our schools, homes and communities as they do in the classroom.
“We can make our facilities and operations integral to our pedagogy, using them as models for a new way forward. They can excite, inspire and provoke, or they can be seen as out of sync and contradictory to the messages we are teaching in the classroom. Our institutions have a choice about the messages we send about the things we value through the way we operate day-to-day.
“We hope the symposium will make it easier for schools to live the values they teach, aligning their own operations and facilities with the content of the curriculum.”
The event will help school officials see that sustainability can also be cost effective.
“This symposium is important because it pursues matters of sustainability while also recognizing that schools are cash-strapped,” Peterson added. “As (environmentalist) David Orr maintains, our current and future ecological challenges have been created by highly educated people. Thus, as schools, we need to do business differently and educate differently if we want a future different from the current forecast. That said, our double-bottom lines must fit within our budgets. So we’re meeting to continue the hard and noble task of seeking a new standard for our daily work.”
For more information on the program, contact Peterson at petersonm@wra.net or McMillan at tmcmillan@hb.edu.
The Knight Fine Arts Center is located at the corner of Aurora and Oviatt Streets.