Not only is the structure physically eco-friendly, but the walls and floors keep the environment in the minds of students –every classroom is named after a plant or animal native to Virginia and the students walk on floors outlined with images of local wildlife.
Thomas DeBolt, superintendent of Manassas Park schools, touted the new gem of the school system in a story for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, saying, “Every drop of water that falls on this campus doesn’t go into the Chesapeake Bay. It goes in a big cistern, and we pump it back up and use it.” DeBolt said the construction cost would have been roughly the same for a conventional building, which would have required about 50 percent more energy to operate.
VMDO, an architectural contracting company out of Charlottsville, Va., designed the structure, which holds more than 800 students from third through fifth grade. “The highest and best hope we have … is that graduates from this school will be ecological stewards,” said Wyck Knox, project architect for VMDO, in a video produced by the Chesapeake Bay Program.
Bay on the Brink is a multimedia reporting project examining the fate of the Chesapeake Bay. It is produced by fellows at the University of Maryland’s Philip Merrill College of Journalism as part of News21, a consortium of journalism schools. This is the fellows' blog. The full project site is here: http://chesapeake.news21.com
