Can Schools Be Green

For all the hype, can schools actually be Green? To be clear, I am talking about education up to the age of about 18 or so, ignoring tertiary education.  I mean, often you will find a program within the school for saving the environment, but these pail into insignificance with regards to the carbon footprint of the school system itself.

Back in the 1970’s my mother was teaching students in the first few years of their formal schooling, and went for a promotion at work. The inspector who came to look at her teaching actually marked her down for talking about things like the Ozone Layer. The strange thing is that today if went for a similar promotion, you would get marked down for not talking about the very subject. It is amazing what the difference a few years makes.

How about this for a question to ask ourselves…

What is the best metric of a school? Is it the best educational outcome per child, or is it the lowest carbon footprint per child?

So, how did you answer? Any of us who are parents, regardless of how deeply we believe in environmental issues, want the best for our children. Given the choice between a better educational outcome, and a better carbon footprint, I suspect that most people would choose the best educational outcome. The reason is obvious – the educational outcome is an investment in the future of our children that is fairly measurable, whereas the environmental income is more nebulous.

What if you changed this around a bit more…

What is an acceptable carbon footprint for the education of a child?

This is a much harder question to answer, but it really is just a retelling of the previous question. Going one step further…

Does it matter what the carbon footprint of children is?

My guess is that it really does not matter. Let us look at it this way. Educating children is expensive for the country. Let us assume it costs $10,000 per child per year to educate them. I have no idea if this is true, but it sounds like a good number. That means it costs $130,000 over ten years of school. Average wages are about half that, meaning that a child could on average expect to earn their entire school education back in two years.

Now, Compared to this, the carbon cost is minor. I do not know what the numbers are, but I am assuming that the carbon output of educating a child, based on a carbon price of $15/tonne, would be under 10% of this. How about we assume that 5% is average, and 10% is worst case. 5% translates to requiring the child earn for 0.1 years, and 10% translates to 0.2 years. These figures are still rather close to the two year payback.

Now, what if those schools where the carbon output is effectively 10% of the expense are the ones with the better educational outcomes, because they use more resources in their teaching. One would therefore expect that the students at these schools would have superior earning potential, and would earn their education back in well under the two years.

Basically, provided increased carbon emissions leads to better educational outcomes, the raw carbon outcomes do not really matter since they are insignificant with regards to the cost of the education

My thesis is that schools can be green, but it is not their job to be green. It is their job to educate on many subjects including environmental ones. And therefore it is companies like Redshift Wireless who can assist in reducing the cost of education as well as their carbon footprint automatically who need to help the schools, while they concentrate on the teaching.