St Mary of the Angels - A lighthouse of sustainability

Ensuring their new buildings were environmentally friendly was a top priority for everyone at St Mary of the Angels Primary School in Guyra, writes IEU Journalist Tara de Boehmler.

As a member of the Sustainable Schools initiative, staff and students had long been doing waste, power and water audits and looking at ways for the school to reduce its environmental footprint.

With sustainability a priority, School Principal and IEU Member Sharon Wittig says they were thrilled to have the support of the Catholic Schools Office in making their new building green. She adds that weather was also a factor.

“Guyra has an extremely cold climate and the heating costs are phenomenal dollar-wise, and also in terms of the cost to the environment.”

It was Armidale CSO Executive Assistant and IEU Member Paul Holman who applied on behalf of the school community to the Catholic Block Grant Authority and engaged an architect.

“Our brief to the architect was to ensure that this would be something of a lighthouse for other schools within the diocese in terms of reducing the carbon footprint,” Paul says. “Our emphasis was orientation, insulation and ventilation.”

With heating a priority, Paul requested a range of options, not all of which were cheap. The winner was hydronic heating placed within the cement slab. Circulating water is heated by solar panels placed on the rooftops. The entire system is backed up by gas, and any excess solar energy is fed back into the grid.

“The option we chose cost the most but we will get it back through savings on our energy bills in about five to 10 years. This was important as small schools can ill afford to spend half their budget on heating.”

But not everything was expensive. Despite Guyra’s cold climate, the region also gets a lot of sun and the new buildings have been designed to make the most of this.

 All buildings now have a northern orientation and there are large windows on the north side to maximise the warmth and energy.

Polystyrene insulation is used between the bricks and in the veranda, downpipes are galvanised and the use of pinboard on the walls minimises the use of paint.

 “Paint was minimised because we also aimed to make the buildings asthma friendly. Air quality was very important because in cold environments teachers tend to close all the doors and windows. A mechanical ventilation system was installed to address this issue.”

All are happy with the result. Sharon says the windows have the added bonus of providing a pleasant outlook to a landscaped garden and, as for the students, the new design provides a comfortable learning environment while also feeding in to their education.

A ‘smart meter’ will enable students to keep records of electrical consumption and calculate the long-term average. When it is feeding back into the grid they will be able to keep track of this too.

Dollar-wise, Paul says the cost of this building program was about $2.5 million. “Of this, we estimate about $50,000 was an additional cost related to using sustainable technologies,” he says. “It wasn’t a large portion of the total cost.”

Following the success of this program, the school will now access the Federal Government’s Solar Schools funding to purchase $50,000 worth of solar panels to supply general electricity to the school. Once again, excess energy will feed back into the grid, helping the school to further reduce energy costs.

Sharon says the benefits for the students will be far reaching.

“I think we have children who have an unbelievable sense of care and concern firstly for each other, and also for the environment. This program helps them to see the real meaning in things and it shows them that they can make a difference. It keeps this learning with them forever.”

“We are grateful to the CSO for backing us in wanting to be a sustainable school and for helping us build this resource for it.”

The building was completed by Warren Steel from DRA Architects at Grafton.