Education  May 22, 2009

‘Lobo Way’ takes RMHS to most efficient

FORT COLLINS – Tom Lopez acted as a leader to institute change within a group of more than 1,500 under his guidance, with surprising and awesome results.

By creating the right culture, Lopez saw his group affect a 50 percent energy-use reduction over the course of eight years, saving tens of thousands of dollars in electricity expenses.

Lopez is not the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, nor is he a profession efficiency evangelist. He is the principal of Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins.

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Poudre School District has had an aggressive energy savings plan in place for almost 10 years. In 2000, the district implemented a centralized HVAC management system that resulted in great savings for all of the schools. Other district-wide efforts furthered the energy efficiency goals, including improved lighting and automated computer shutdown.

In general, the high schools in the district decreased energy use by 35 percent from 1999 through 2007. On top of that, Rocky saw an additional 15 percent savings, outperforming the newly constructed Fossil Ridge High School for energy usage starting in 2006.

Fossil Ridge was built in 2005 as a LEED-certified facility. Rocky was built in 1973 with renovations in 1994 and 2004.

Lopez credits the school’s energy-savings success on culture: Doing things the “Lobo Way.”

“I’m not a rules guy; I’m just about teaching the right thing to do,” he said. “What you must do is a lot of culture building.”

The Lobo Way has been a motto at the school for ages, so Lopez built upon that. The idea is that “Lobos take care of Lobos,” and that includes respecting each other, the equipment and the facilities.

“We started with recycling first,” Lopez said.

The school added a recycling center to make sorting less of a chore. The next challenge was energy use.

Textbook example of change

The Lobo Way is a part of Rocky’s success, but not all of it. In fact, the situation at Rocky Mountain is a textbook example of organizational change, according to Colorado State University sociology professor Jennifer Cross. Poudre School District Operations Manager Bill Franzen asked her to study what made Rocky Mountain students and staff so much more energy efficient than their counterparts in the district.

“(Rocky) was performing at the same level as Fossil Ridge, which is LEED certified,” Franzen said. “We realized that it was about how they had changed behavior.”

Cross decided to meet with students at Rocky and Poudre High School. Poudre was selected because its facility and student population were the most similar to Rocky.

What Cross found was that Rocky was displaying a perfect example of the organizational behavior change model, while Poudre was not. The model has four “C’s”:

n Commitment to change.

n Charismatic leadership.

n Communication.

n Culture.

“It all works together,” Cross said. “They all reinforce each other.”

In Rocky’s case, the school had leadership from students and staff as well as the principal. The custodial staff agreed to only use the lights necessary while cleaning the school.

Lopez had a lot of help from environmental science teacher Dave Schwartz. Schwartz kept in close contact with the district’s operations team to get updates on energy usage, which he then converted to quantifiable terms – trees saved, carbon footprint reduced, and other metrics.

“At Rocky, people talked about having a feeling of efficacy,” Cross said. At the same time, Poudre staff and students described the opposite feeling – that their individual efforts would not amount to much.

The feeling of efficacy adds to the commitment to change and is caused by communication. Schwartz’ ability to relate energy savings back to the school in tangible terms was very important. By communicating throughout the school that energy efficiency is important and individual efforts are effective, students and staff really started to care about the effort.

“Intention is the one of the most important predictors of behavior,” Cross said.

But caring about conservation means little without the intent to actually do so. Cross pointed out that individuals are often influenced to adopt the intentions of an organization they belong to, even if it is not a part of their individual values. She recalls speaking with some Rocky teachers who said they don’t conserve energy at home but do at school because that is part of the culture there.

Commitment to a goal

In order to set an intention, an organization must have charismatic leadership, not necessarily at the top, but throughout the group. Because the leader has a goal, and the group cares about the leader, the group adopts the goal. “You can’t come in and mandate that people make behavior changes,” Cross said.

Also adding to the commitment at Rocky was competition. The natural competition built into the public school system lends itself greatly to this model. It speaks to the culture of the group and to the commitment to change.

The district’s operations team has been compiling data for each school, but released the statistics in a single document. Since schools have been receiving data for all facilities it became a part of an energy-savings rivalry.

Franzen said the results of the case study could have wide-ranging implications.

“My interest was in seeing if there was a way we could replicate this to share with other schools in the district and other districts,” Franzen said.

Replication is part of what he is doing now. Franzen retired from Poudre School District this year and has started a consulting firm, Sage2 Associates LLC. He is contracting with the Governor’s Energy Office to identify energy-efficiency opportunities for school districts throughout the state.

He said that in addition to operations-level changes, the behavior change element is crucial, especially since many small districts do not have the resources to implement sweeping facility changes.

“It was all about changing behavior rather than building a $30 million state-of-the-art school,” he said. “Not everyone can have a LEED-certified building.”

FORT COLLINS – Tom Lopez acted as a leader to institute change within a group of more than 1,500 under his guidance, with surprising and awesome results.

By creating the right culture, Lopez saw his group affect a 50 percent energy-use reduction over the course of eight years, saving tens of thousands of dollars in electricity expenses.

Lopez is not the CEO of a Fortune 500 company, nor is he a profession efficiency evangelist. He is the principal of Rocky Mountain High School in Fort Collins.

Poudre School District has had an aggressive energy savings plan in place for almost 10 years.…

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