Buildings
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Sustainable buildings include the following elements:
- A healthy, well-located, suitable site
- A design and construction process that optimizes resource use over the full lifetime of the building, and is appropriate for the local climate and geology.
- Building commissioning to ensure performance as designed
- Operations and maintenance procedures that maintain value while considering resource use, toxicity, and human impacts.
- Consideration of how the building use might interact with the surrounding community
Building design has been demonstrated to have an impact on human performance. This includes both that of the teachers and staff in the school as well as the academic performance of the students.
Natural Disaster Considerations
In Oregon, nearly half of the state's public school buildings have a high or very high risk of sustaining life-threatening damage in a maximum-case earthquake. For more about this assessment, as well as additional information about how natural disasters affect the sustainability of Oregon's schools, go to Natural Disasters - Earthquakes, Tsunami's, and Flooding.