The “outdoor classroom” at Alvarado School
on Douglass Street has
vegetable and flower gardens and a 1,300-gallon tank for
rainwater runoff.
Next on tap are solar panels. Principal Robert
Broecker says they’re all
part of an environmental education. Photo by
Beverly Tharp
Alvarado Elementary is poised to become the first
public school in
San Francisco to use the sun as a major source of power.
Solar panels could be installed as early as this
summer, with work
completed by early fall.
Charles Sheehan, a spokesman for the city’s
Public Utilities
Commission, which would oversee the installation, estimated
the panels would
generate up to 50 kilowatts of power, or about 40 percent of
the school’s
needs.
The switch on the citywide clean energy project
was flipped March
13, when District 8 Supervisor Scott Wiener submitted a
resolution authorizing
the PUC to install “photovoltaic power projects” on San
Francisco Unified
School District buildings.
The resolution is pending approval by the Board
of Supervisors’
budget and finance committee, Wiener’s office said.
The PUC chose Alvarado, at Douglass and Alvarado
streets, after
analyzing roof conditions at a number of schools. Sheehan said
the agency
needed to determine whether adequate sunlight fell across a
roof, whether trees
or other buildings blocked the sun, and whether a roof could
handle the weight
of the panels.
The Noe Valley facility proved “an ideal location
based on all
these factors,” he said. “It has a good roof and good sun, and
that’s what we
were looking for.”
Wiener said he was particularly excited that
Alvarado, “one of our
finest public elementary schools,” was chosen first for the
panels. He also is
eager to see the program spread citywide.
“Numerous schools have flat roofs and significant
sunlight
exposure,” he said. “These roofs provide a great opportunity
to increase solar
power generation in San Francisco while greening our schools.”
Under Wiener’s legislation, the PUC will maintain
the solar
panels. The installation at Alvarado is expected to cost about
$500,000,
Sheehan said.
The school already has a small solar receiver
that PG&E
installed seven years ago on an upper playground. Students
mainly use the
low-power device as an tool to discover how much energy is
made on certain
types of days—such as when the skies are sunny or overcast.
The solar panel effort grew out of conversations
two years ago
that a group of Alvarado parents held with former District 8
Supervisor Bevan
Dufty and Laura Spanjian, then an assistant general manager
with the PUC. The
parents included Todd David, who has two children at the
school; Victor Lubet,
whose daughter is in fourth grade; and Gabriela Tinoco, who
has a daughter in
second grade.
“It took us a while to get here,” said Tinoco,
who along with
Lubet co-chairs the school’s green committee. “We’re very
excited that this is
going to happen.”
Tinoco said the group’s purpose has been to help
“kids learn about
water conservation and energy efficiency—and solar panels is
another component
of our green team goal.”
Alvarado Principal Robert Broecker said the solar
panels would
provide a great opportunity for students.
“It’s exciting news,” said Broecker, who’s been
principal for the
past five years and was a teacher at the school for five years
before that.
Alvarado is a dual immersion
Spanish-English school with 520
students in kindergarten through fifth grade. It also is a
high-ranking
academic school with strong parental involvement.
For a number of years, the school has provided
students with an
extra measure of “greening and environmental education,”
Broecker said, “and
this is the latest in that.”
The students, for example, are actively engaged
in water
conservation and hands-on gardening in what they call their
“secret garden” or
“outdoor classroom.”
One green lesson is a water catchment system that
collects
rainwater from rooftops, feeds it through pipes, and stores it
in a
1,300-gallon aboveground cistern.
“We fill up empty buckets and water the plants,”
said Sebastian
Gonzalez, 10, showing off a still-thriving winter garden of
lettuce, carrots,
and Swiss chard.
Alvarado’s young students also are adept in the
art of
manufacturing compost heaps—using lunchtime garbage and worms
and soil—to
enrich the flower and vegetable gardens.
“It’s really educating our students on sorting
out lunch waste…and
increasing the diversion rate from landfills,” Broecker said.
“We’ve been doing
this for the last two years, and we’ve been maintaining an 87
percent diversion
rate.”
Last year, Broecker said, Alvarado was honored
for having the
highest diversion rate in the district.
The decision to launch a full-fledged solar
project at Alvarado
drew enthusiastic applause from the school’s environmentally
savvy
fifth-graders.
Levi Humphrey, 11, called it a fun science
project.
“We can learn how much energy we can save,” he
said, “and we don’t
have to use our electricity as much if we get it from the
sun.”
