Education

Rural Kentucky School Billed as One of Nation’s Greenest

By Diette Courrégé Casey — August 15, 2012 1 min read
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A rural Kentucky school featured in a national magazine is being billed as one of the country’s greenest.

Richardsville Elementary School in Warren County, Ky., was one of two schools featured prominently in the cover story of Sunday’s Parade magazine.

The “Special Report: Rebuilding America’s Schools” estimates that 40 percent of the country’s 100,000 public schools are in “poor or bad” condition, and Richardsville Elementary, which is nine miles north of Bowling Green, was highlighted as a success story.

Parade magazine’s editor-in-chief, Maggie Murphy, did an interview about the story on “Morning Joe” on MSNBC. She called Richardsville Elementary the “most green building in America,” in part because it sells power it generates back to the county.

The magazine deliberately chose a suburban and rural school for the story because the facilities issue has received less attention there than in urban areas, Murphy said.

Neither the article nor the interview details how much the building cost or how it was funded. Murphy did say that the Kentucky community set out to create a school that would generate capital by being green, and it uses geothermal pumps to heat and cool the building.

It consumes about one-fourth of the energy of a typical school, and it’s saved an estimated $7 million in operating costs since 2003, according to the story.

A version of this news article first appeared in the Rural Education blog.