K-12 classrooms and educational spaces are problematic. They approximately consume 30% of our electricity, generate 35% of our waste, use 8% of water resources and are responsible for 20% of greenhouse gas (GHC) and carbon dioxide emissions. The new construction sector of the building industry has benefited from green building strategies and products to produce high performance commercial buildings, but how applicable are these strategies in improving performance and indoor environmental quality (IEQ) of K-12 classrooms? This problem is magnified due to the large number of existing educational spaces, generally a product of the past 30-50 years, that are energy and environmentally unconscious. In addition, new schools design typically focus on overall building performance metrics but tend to overlook design implications on the classroom level as the unit of analysis. In the US alone, these inefficient classroom spaces exceed 20 billion square foot. This paper reports on the analysis of 16 evidence-based design strategies to green retrofit existing schools for carbon neutrality, reduced resources consumption, and improved IEQ. Using dynamic simulation and parametric modeling tools, this study employed an experimental design approach to assess the impact of the design strategies on resource and carbon consumption as well as IEQ impacts of each design strategy in a comparative analysis for ASHRAE climate zone 4c of the mid-valley Pacific Northwest (Portland, OR-Seattle, WA). The model was benchmarked against existing performance of five existing schools to ensure accuracy of the parameters used in the simulations. The results of our energy simulation data is further analyzed with regards to an extensive meta-analysis of more than 300 prior studies related to the impacts of the 16 strategies on students' performance. Results show that improved operation and management strategies of existing systems reduced resource consumption and emissions by 15%. Additional improvements in envelope upgrades ranged from 20-60%, with two optimized bundled solutions reaching resource and GHC reduction levels of 80%. Implications to achieving Arch 2030 challenge and carbon neutrality by 2020 are discussed. The hope is to provide decisions support tool for practitioners and school principals that would help them prioritize and evaluate green classroom retrofit strategies in a comprehensive way.
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