Introduction

Purpose of NY-CHPS

The purpose of NY-CHPS is to provide a framework that helps school districts and their design teams design and build sustainable school buildings that enhance the educational environment and facilitate learning.  High performance schools optimize resources over the life of the facility, are less expensive to operate than standard buildings, and help to ensure healthy, safe, and high quality learning environments for all occupants.

NY-CHPS was developed as part of a collaborative effort between the New York State Education Department and the New York State Energy Research and Development Authority.  An Advisory Council was created to inform and guide the process consisting of members of the following groups: Superintendents of Buildings and Grounds Association, Association of Educational Safety and Health Professionals, Association of School Business Officials, Council of School Superintendents, New York State Department of Health, a Teacher, the Healthy Schools Network, ASHRAE, Association of Energy Engineers, and the American Institute of Architects.  NY-CHPS is built from a Massachusetts version of the guidelines of the Collaborative for High Performance Schools, Inc. (CHPS).  CHPS was originally developed as part of a collaborative effort in California.  New York is grateful for all those involved in the California and Massachusetts development processes.  In recognition of the development process, New York has named these guidelines, NY-CHPS.

Provide an Outstanding Learning Environment

First and foremost, schools designed to meet NY-CHPS must improve the learning environment.  Mostly this is accomplished by ensuring that classrooms are comfortable and do not have visual (e.g., glare), audio (e.g., background noise), thermal or other indoor environmental quality (IEQ) conditions (e.g., poor air quality) that could inhibit learning.

School Facilities Must Be Durable

NY-CHPS helps designers and school districts understand the true life-cycle cost of a school, focusing not just on construction costs, but also on energy, maintenance, and replacement costs. School construction bonds are typically paid over periods up to 30 years.  New school buildings must include technologies and building materials that outlast the bonds that pay for them.  NY-CHPS helps designers and school officials select flooring, roofing, wall, and other building systems based on total, life-cycle cost of ownership.

School Facilities Must Be Easy to Maintain

Schools must be properly maintained to be energy efficient and healthy.  Maintenance expenses must be considered during design because they represent a significant expense to school districts and taxpayers.  High performance schools recognize the vital role of durable products and ease of maintenance in keeping buildings healthy and safe.  Healthy and safe buildings can contribute to lower absenteeism rates and more productive occupants.

Buildings Should Be Designed to Utilize and Preserve Natural Resources

Schools buildings should be designed with special attention to building orientation on the site to capture natural lighting, passive solar heating during the winter months, and natural cooling effects during the warm months.  Designers must pay special attention to room location (to benefit from daylight), window sizing and placements, and glazing selection.  Sites should also be selected to preserve natural resources and to minimize adverse impacts on the environment.

Renovation Projects Are an Opportunity for High Performance Design

The average school building in New York is over 50 years old as of 2005.  Many will undergo significant renovation in the coming years.  The renovation of school buildings provides school districts with an opportunity to increase energy efficiency and indoor environmental quality while maintaining and promoting building durability.  Healthy and environmentally-friendly schools can contribute substantially to achievement of educational goals.  High performance renovation can help New York’s older school buildings to continue to cost-effectively serve school districts for many years to come.

Provide Long-Term Benefits to Students, Teachers and Taxpayers

High performance schools provide direct and indirect benefits to teachers and students by improving the educational environment through spaces that are well lit, have good acoustics and indoor air quality, and are designed to optimize learning.  School districts that build high performance schools derive savings through reduced energy, maintenance, and replacement costs.  High performance schools take steps to be the next generation of schools that provide lasting benefits to the community.

General Notes 

NY-CHPS is an Appendix to the NYSED Manual of Planning Standards (MPS).  All school construction projects that fall under the auspices of NYSED and that require a building permit must meet all local (where applicable), state and federal codes, as well as all requirements in the MPS, including the New York Uniform Fire Prevention and Building Code and the New York State Energy Conservation Construction Code.  To maintain consistency among the various NYSED documents, various sections of NY-CHPS reference specific New York State Codes, regulations of the New York State Department of Environmental Conservation, and federal requirements.  In addition, some sections that address building operations include a requirement that “the school district must develop a formal policy to …”  These kinds of requirements are intended to involve the school district superintendent and the school board to formalize policies that will benefit the school for years to come.

What is a High Performance School?

A high performance school has three distinct attributes: it is designed to create a healthy and comfortable learning and working environment; it is less costly to operate than a conventional school over the life of the building; and it is constructed to conserve important resources such as energy and water.

A high performance school is designed with durable materials and uses high-efficiency, “correctly-sized” heating, ventilating, and air conditioning (HVAC) equipment and lighting systems.  Appropriate amounts of glare-free daylight are brought into the school to enhance the learning environment and reduce lighting costs.  The building shell integrates the most effective combination of insulation, glazing, and thermal mass to ensure energy efficiency.  Plumbing fixtures are specified to reduce water consumption.  Together, these measures significantly reduce the operational costs of running the school building.  Based on recent research completed around the country, 20% - 40% cost savings in utility bills are common versus a non-high-performance building of the same size and shape.

A high performance school is also thermally, visually, and acoustically comfortable.  Thermal comfort means that teachers, students and administrators are neither hot nor cold as they go about their daily activities.  Visual comfort means that the quality of lighting makes visual tasks, such as reading and following classroom presentations, easier.  Acoustic comfort is achieved when students and teachers can easily hear and comprehend each other, and are not impeded by loud ventilation systems or noise from adjoining spaces or the outdoors.

Indoor air quality is another important feature of a high performance school.  The significant amount of time students and teachers spend inside schools during their educational career, combined with children’s increased susceptibility to indoor pollutants, underscores the importance of good indoor air quality.  Indoor pollutants such as chemical toxins and biological agents can create significant health risks and adverse learning conditions.  In a high performance school, air intakes are located away from potential sources of contamination and ventilation systems are designed to optimize quantities of fresh air.  Architects and engineers also incorporate best design practices to prevent water intrusion into wall and roof assemblies.  This, in turn, reduces the potential for the accumulation of moisture in materials that could support mold growth or lead to premature replacement of indoor finishes and even structural elements.

Where possible, a high performance school is built on an environmentally responsible site.  To the extent possible, the school's site should conserve existing natural areas and incorporates them into the curriculum.  Stormwater runoff is minimized or captured on site for irrigation or flushing water closets.  The site should be accessible to bicycle and pedestrian traffic and be conveniently located for community activities.

While operational savings, environmental stewardship, and community-building are attractive benefits, it is important to emphasize that, above all, a high performance school must provide an environment that enhances the primary mission of the New York State Education Department: to raise the knowledge, skill, and opportunity of all the people of New York.

How Much More Will It Cost?

It is usually assumed that building high performance schools is more costly, but that is not always the case.  By using an integrated design process from the start, better buildings can usually be built at little — and sometimes no — additional construction cost.  Higher design costs may be incurred, but this is usually only a small fraction of overall project costs and many times incremental design costs can be offset by savings in other areas.  For example, if an architect proposes the possibility of saving energy by changing the windows from double glazing to triple glazing, this will save energy but will cost more money for the windows.  But then the engineers might find that they can eliminate the perimeter hot water radiation system because the perimeter heat loss is reduced, and heating can be done with just heat from the air system.  A designer might also determine that air duct sizes for heating and cooling can also be reduced, or the boiler may be downsized.  In the final analysis, the reductions in HVAC equipment could more than pay for the added cost for the triple glazing.  In the traditional, non-integrated process — in which designers primarily sit in their separate offices and use a standard, “worst case design” sheet method — such integrated savings and advantages are often not possible, and systems can be needlessly over designed and inefficient.

Most architectural and engineering firms involved in school design have already developed at least some expertise in sustainable design and high performance schools.  However, there are a number of new skills and processes involved in the design of a high performance school that deserve additional fees.  A commissioning authority and an energy analysis firm may need to be added to the design team at additional cost.  These are usually contracted directly by the owner.  The architect is usually in charge of the high performance design process and will have a number of additional tasks to perform in executing and documenting the process.  The engineers, who in the past were usually paid on a percentage of the cost of the equipment in their work, may have additional tasks related to high performance design and may be asked to reduce the size and cost of their equipment to more closely match the reduced building loads.  School districts are encouraged to openly discuss these potential costs with their design professionals at the interview stage.

Despite the efforts of skilled professionals using an integrated design process, a high performance school's first cost may be slightly more than that of a conventional design.  But the cost/benefit analysis of the project as a whole (as in past projects) will show substantial savings.  A report published in December, 2005, by the Massachusetts Technology Collaborative indicated that for 30 high performance schools nationwide and an analysis of available research, high performance schools cost 1.5% to 2.5% more than conventional schools, but the high performance schools provide financial benefits that are 10 to 20 times as large.  Savings can accrue from reduced energy use, reduced water and sewer use, reduced equipment maintenance and replacement costs (by using life-cycle cost analysis to select materials, for example), reduced site maintenance, reduced liability costs and even possibly reduced sick-time losses from student and teacher absences by eliminating out gassing of volatile organic compounds from the building materials.

Using NY-CHPS

NY-CHPS is provided by NYSED as a benchmark for high performance school buildings.

NY-CHPS is divided into seven sections: site; water; energy; materials; indoor environmental quality (IEQ); operations and maintenance; and extra credit.  Each section has prerequisites that must be achieved, with the remainder of NY-CHPS consisting of optional credits.  These prerequisites and credits allow the school district to show that their completed school meets the criteria for being a New York High Performance School.  To obtain this standing, a minimum of all prerequisites and 65 credits must be achieved.  The school district must maintain documentation proving that the prerequisites and claimed credits have been met so that the public can review the documentation.  Furthermore, for the credits that include Post-Construction documentation, that documentation must be gathered after the school is completed to demonstrate that the building is performing as predicted.  All documentation must be maintained where it can be accessed for a period of five years at the school district offices.

NYSED provides NY-CHPS to help designers produce better high performance schools, but the use of NY-CHPS is voluntary.  Following NY-CHPS is not required — as following NYSED’s Manual of Planning Standards is — in order to receive a construction permit from NYSED.

NY-CHPS Scoresheet

The following table can serve as a worksheet for totaling your points.