Board wants daylit, energy efficient middle school. Studies show students enjoy physical and academic benefits from classrooms that are lit by the sun instead of light fixtures.

By Kirk Ross, Staff Writer.

While school officials hope their plans for a fourth middle school will generate a lot more light than heat in the political sense, Mike Nicklas and Gary Bailey are determined to make that literally true.

Nicklas and Bailey are the principals in Innovative Design, a Raleigh-based design firm that specializes in building energy-efficient, daylit schools.

The 20-year old company has spent the last several years concentrating on daylit schools and now have seen 10 of their designs built for Wake and Johnston Counties. They are also working on a statewide "sustainable schools" plan for the state of Texas that emphasizes environmental and energy efficiency planning.

A daylit school goes beyond the use of skylights and atriums. It virtually turns the roof itself into one big diffusion screen. Proponents say the design yields a more even, full light throughout the classrooms. There are elements of daylighting at four Chapel Hill-Carrboro Schools: McDougle Elementary, McDougle Middle, East Chapel Hill High and the new Southern Village elementary.

Innovative Design was recently hired to work with Chapel Hill architects Corley, Redfoot, Zack, on the new middle school slated to be built on a 45-acre university owned tract on Homestead Road.

Nicklas said he has become a true believer in the benefits of sunshine, which provides light in a much broader spectrum than artificial lighting systems. "We were always strong on environmental concerns and were interested in using more daylight," Nicklas said. Daylight is about one-third cooler than the florescent lighting most schools have. In the South, where a major cost is in cooling the building, that can make a big difference in energy efficiency, he said. But it wasn't until Bailey and Nicklas read over a set of studies from Canada that the other benefits of full-spectrum lighting became clear.

The Canadian studies, which examined the physiological effects on children in daylit schools, were impressive, Nicklas said. Kids grew an average of a centimeter more per year and had 900 times fewer cavities. Plus, schools attendance was up.

These results, coupled with the 50 to 60 percent energy savings daylit designs offer, were benefits the firm could not ignore, Nicklas said.

Two years ago, Innovative Design did its own studies to explore whether the daylit designed schools produced any academic benefits. The results were equally impressive. Three schools the firm designed in Johnston County showed an average rise in test scores of 14 percent.

"There had been a lot of studies on the rise in productivity in offices with daylighting, but productivity is pretty hard to measure," Nicklas said. The company's studies were among the first to quantify daylight-enhanced productivity and Innovative Design has since become a focus for researchers in the subject.

Now, the Chapel Hill-Carrboro school board wants to see more daylight as well. The board, which recently went over specifications for the new school with its architects, is trying to find a way to balance environmental concerns on the site with the interest in making the building as daylit as possible.

At issue is whether the 45-acre tract is large enough to accommodate a one-story building and still protect the watershed around Bolin Creek, which runs along the southern border of the property. The board, Thursday night, asked architect Ken Redfoot to work on both a one-story and two-story design for the building in case the footprint of a one-story building exceeds the runoff limits in a new set of development guidelines the Town of Carrboro is drafting for the area.

But both Nicklas and his partner say it will be important come up with a plan to make all the classrooms daylit. "The worst thing you can do is stack grades on top of each other," Nicklas said. "Then the top will have all the daylight and the bottom level will be noticeably different and, in effect inferior."

At Thursday's meeting, school board members asked Redfoot and Bailey to find a way to put the guidance, administrative offices and other non-classroom function in the lower floor of a two-story design.