Almost every year in my town, teachers get laid off due to budget cuts. I’d like to look at a different way to save money.
Most of the school buildings are old, drafty, and in poor repair. They must cost a fortune to heat. How much could be saved by upgrading their insulation and heating to save fuel?
The savings would take many years to pay back the investment. It might be more cost-effective to demolish and build again.
You might also want to look at financing city expenditure on a different plan, as it plainly isn’t raising enough money.
Shouldn’t you be putting this question to your school board, who are familiar with the schools in question, how they are built and how they are heated, rather than a bunch of strangers in cyberspace, who are not?
Setting aside the fact that the budget for building maintenance is very different than that for teacher and administrative salaries, the return on investment for energy efficiency upgrades is a large capital expenditure gets paid back over a long period of reduced heating fuel and electricity costs, and is therefore not a direct offset. Specifically how much is saved depends on the current condition of the buildings and the costs of heating and electricity, but unless the district is prepared to do some substantial renovations, including installing air locks, high quality double pane windows, and energy efficient commerical appliances for year round efficiency it probably isn’t as big a savings as you’d need to justify even the cost of the modifications made. If the buildings are actually “old, drafty, and in poor repair”, it is probably more practical to progressively demolish and replace rather than retrofit, and build new buildings to LEED/Passivhaus Commercial standards, which is costly but will produce large net differences in energy costs over the long term, especially if energy costs increase up as projected.
As far as teachers getting cut due to budget cuts, I assure you this is not an issue of either/or, but rather than teachers are seen as the least valued and most fungible part of the education system. As a school administrator you have to provide textbooks for every student, equipment for gym classes and sports teams, cafeteria service, school busing, special education, et cetera, butting a teacher and redistributing students to a few more per classroom is viewed as easy and basically painless, as is cutting advanced studies or alternative/vocational-technical classes, extracurricular activities, et cetera. From an administrative standpoint, public schools are often viewed basically as warehouses with the goal of getting suffiicent attendance to get a full payment and provide basic educational services. (This still compares favorably to most for-profit charter schools which view it as sufficient to just get students in the door so they can be counted as in attendance and provide wholly inadequate educational services, often to students who are most in need of help.) If you freed up money from increased energy efficiency it would just go to reducing the overall school budget, not hiring or retaining teachers.
Stranger
There’s still low-hanging fruit that isn’t being picked, though. Yeah, it’d cost a lot to put in double-paned windows, and a full HVAC overhaul, and so on, but it’d be cheap to, say, install a thermostat. I’ve been in schools where, in the depths of winter, all of the students still wear short sleeves and the teachers open the windows, because the heat only has two settings, “off” and “broil”.
Then again, this is in the same district that insisted on installing new windows over the summer in a building that was scheduled for demolition that same summer, and which hired armed guards to enure that teachers couldn’t remove any supplies from the building before it could get knocked down on top of them
Most older large buildings like school building suse a fuel oil heated steam boiler instead of forced air for heating, so a thermostat wouldn’t do anything to reduce heating costs. Modern HVAC systems are far more efficient than steam radiator heat, but retrofitting old buildings with the ductwork for forced air is impractical.
Stranger.
I don’t have any hard answers for this, just some observations from my daughter’s school:
–We are in moderately inland SoCal, so there are a lot of hot days.
–My daughter’s elementary school recently had a lot of ancient “temporary” (=40 years old) flimsy wood trailer additions with window ACs replaced with newer structures. The new classrooms are sort of cool prefab boxes assembled to make buildings of the desired shape, but there’s some kind of central ducting, and I could see that they were well-insulated during construction.
–The main building (1930s) has some kind of central AC, but the south facing classrooms on the upper floor are brutal even with shades down on hot days.
–A couple years ago the school installed extensive solar panels over a lot of the playground area. I don’t know what the economics of it are over X years, but I think there were probably some tax incentives. In addition, the panels provide much-needed shade on a truly massive asphalt sprawl.
In addition, would add that my high school in very cold upstate NY would sometimes open windows in dead of winter because the heat was just not regulatable, as Chronos says.
And the radiators don’t have any regulation? Hot-water radiators usually do, maybe steam ones don’t.
To know the specific savings, as Dewey Finn said, one would need to look at the specific buildings. At the same time, it’s perfectly possible that something as simple as putting weatherstrips in windows isn’t done at all. It can easily lead to differences of 5ºC (9F). Improving insulation doesn’t need to involve renovations.
Our school (small private one admittedly, in old buildings) had steam radiators that were pretty much on or off. Weatherproofing windows wasn’t on the radar then (more years ago than I want to say), and heating costs were probably not the biggest budget worry for the board.
That sounds like my old primary school and several of the classrooms in my old high school. They were heated with water-filled radiators, which were magnificent in the harshness of a South Island winter, but suffered from the “Off” or “Sauna” setting issue.
Still, when it was literally freezing outside, sitting against one of those things was luxury for a 10-year-old. 
Under the Blair govt in the UK one of the good things they did was actually this - requiring schools to become fit for use. No more toilets where you had to go outside to use them and working heating were two of the factors included.
Unfortunately they did this via what’s called Public Private Investment - they essentially sold off the schools cheaply to private investors who leased them back to the schools at high rates and introduced rules like the caretaking/janitorial staff being answerable only to them, which is a problem when you need a simple thing like getting a new key cut and have to go through an external agency. Also it didn’t apply to so-called temporary buildings even if they’d been there when the kids’ parents went to school. So it didn’t save money in the end. I have doubts that any such change in the US would be less favourable to the private sector.
No, that doesn’t sound like the school I’m talking about. The one I’m talking about, it could be single-digit temperatures outside, and everyone still sat as far away from the radiators as they could.
EDIT: That’s single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, which corresponds to negative double-digits in Celsius.
Thanks for the (inaccurate) editorializing. Teacher and support staff salaries make up the largest part of a public school budget, by far. In my district, salaries and benefits make up 69 percent of the annual budget. Fungible? Are you kidding? It is nigh impossible to fire and replace any teachers, no matter how bad they are.
But, to answer the OP, while it may make sense to make the suggested upgrades, it comes down to spending a large amount of money now for a benefit that will accrue over many years. It’s hard to make that kind of “investment” when funds are always tight. And, in reality, heating the school buildings is peanuts compared to salaries, benefits and other expenditures.
Really? Where is this district? I’m a union teacher in a PA public school. In fact, I’m a union building rep and former president. All it takes for a bad teacher to get fired is for the district to have administrators who aren’t afraid to do their jobs. In the period before a teacher attains tenure (3 consecutive years of contracted full-time teaching in the same district), the teacher can be let go at the end of the year for any reason or for no reason. Once tenured, the teacher can be fired just by following due process. That means, here in PA, that the administrators do at least two unfavorable classroom observations. The teacher needs to be made aware of what hir shortcomings are and be given the opportunity to correct them. Failure to improve is grounds for dismissal. There is also a whole raft of stuff for which a teacher can be dismissed immediately.
You’re correct that all of that CAN happen, but I haven’t seen it happen. And, yes, I place the blame firmly in the laps of the administrators. They do not want to upset the apple cart. My kids had several absolutely lousy teachers (with this opinion echoed by numerous other students and parents), and nothing ever happens. The only teachers I have seen removed were because they were found to be having sex with students. Otherwise, the bad teachers are allowed to suck in their pay and benefits and work until they retire.
Teachers are laid off due to budgetary constraints. Unfortunately, that typically impacts the youngest, most energetic, diligent teachers because they are at the low end of the seniority totem pole. The district is not allowed to choose who to lay off based on who are the worst teachers.
I also spent three years working in TX where it is illegal for teachers to unionize and teachers can be dismissed easily. You still need administrators who will do their job right. I saw merit pay awarded and staffing decided by who was buddies with the building principal; who was most energetic or diligent had nothing to do with it.
At about the time we moved to our town, several municipal buildings including two schools were upgraded in this manner and converted to geothermal. All are despised for poor temp control and net savings have been nowhere near what was promised.
I believe that most non traditional heating and cooling systems work fine in the lab and under very narrow real world conditions, but with real daily users can’t keep up with their limitations. What works for a conscientious Swedish couple doesn’t necessarily work for retrofitted public buildings.
I don’t disagree. Principals, and in some cases, superintendents, look out for their buddies and cronies. I suppose that isn’t unusual in many organizations, but it’s painfully easy to see in school districts. Our high school principal is a nice guy, but he is completely inept and incompetent in terms of supervising and managing the staff. It’s embarrassing what some of the teachers get away with.
But in terms of the OP’s query, the bulk of the money goes to salaries and benefits. Building heating is small potatoes.
This line of work already exists, there is an entire business model to do just as the OP wishes for. I know of 2 companies in this work. One of them specializes in this at the university level and another is into the industrial market.
Who said anything about geothermal or other nontraditional heating systems? We’re talking about giving school buildings the same standard systems that are used in all new construction.