Watauga Gone Green: How We Keep Our Building Clean

Photo Creds: SfL+a Construction

Grant Painter, Staff Writer for The Powderhorn

Introduction

If you’ve ever taken a class on the basement floor at Watauga High School, you’d be familiar with the hum emanating from the walls, especially in the dead-center 1200 hall. That hum you heard isn’t just the automotive classes. Two large pumps behind the wall power the school’s geothermal heat system. 

Those pumps are just some of the key components in a large, complex system that helps to make up Watauga High School’s LEED Certification. According to the official LEED website from the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), LEED, which stands for Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, is the most widely recognized green building rating system in the world. It offers a framework, or foundation, for healthy, efficient, and cost-effective green buildings, providing environmental and social benefits. Since its inception, LEED has served as the leading certification for efficient buildings.

Old Category, Same Old Tricks

As outlined on WHS’s scorecard from 2012, in getting LEED certified, a building must meet certain criteria within 6 distinct categories: sustainable sites, water efficiency, energy and atmosphere, material and resources, indoor environmental quality, and innovation. These categories are intentionally designed to address everything from water and energy use to material selection, covering every base for what makes a building sustainable. 

Each category, excluding water efficiency and innovation, has prerequisites that must be met to be eligible for LEED certification. In particular, these requirements include locations for storing and collecting recyclable materials, controlling environmental tobacco smoke, and a minimum energy efficiency statistic, among other necessities.

If you review WHS’ 2012 LEED scorecard for yourself, you might notice the numbers seem a little off. Below is a screenshot of one of the categories listed on the scorecard:

Example of a category shown on Watauga High School’s LEED Certification scorecard.

For each criterion met, a point is awarded. Required criteria, or prerequisites, don’t award points. In total, excluding the required criteria, WHS was awarded 37 out of 79 possible points in its LEED certification.

Note that Watauga High School received its LEED certification in 2012, shortly after it was built. 

Watauga High School was ranked using the v2007 system in LEED’s BD+C category, which stands for “Building Design + Construction.” According to the USGBC’s support site, certifications under the LEED BD+C and LEED ID+C (Interior Design + Construction) rating systems do not expire. The organization explains that because these ratings certify the design and construction of a building, the certification stays valid for as long as the building exists in its certified form. This means that while the school has had additions since its LEED certification, such as the wind turbine by the football field, these changes are not reflected on the scorecard.

However, something far more significant goes unaddressed: any points the building gained remain no matter what, meaning even if systems aren’t functioning properly anymore, the high school still maintains its LEED certification.

How a Box Makes (and Breaks) Sustainability

In the corner of every classroom ceiling in Watauga High School, you’ll find a presence sensor. That little box detects whether or not a person is in the room. If the room is empty for a set period of time, it shuts off the lights to conserve power. When the building was certified, it received points on the “optimize energy performance” credit under Energy & Atmosphere on its scorecard for these sensors. The school also got points for ambient light sensors, a second sensor present in every classroom that adjusts the room’s lighting level in accordance with ambient lighting.

However, these sensors can only provide these benefits when they're functional; if they're not functional, they're effectively no more useful than a paperweight. Science teacher Kevin Shaw, who has worked at WHS since the building opened, isn't confident they still are. 

“I don't know if many of these sensors still work,” Shaw said. 

These sensors are just one component of a much broader concern. A lot of the technology and systems that gave WHS what it needed to get LEED Silver aren’t actually functional, even if they were when the building received its certification in 2012. For example, the wind turbine by the football field.

“The turbine came after the building was finished. There was a Wind Across America Schools program that went on, and ASU was heavily involved in that program. We got a turbine here, there's one in Ashe, and there's one in Avery,” said Shaw. “If there’s too much of a gust, those windmills are designed to literally shut themselves off. They break themselves.”

Automated Systems Aren’t Automated; Sustainability Requires Moderation

These systems are designed and intended to save money. However, when they fail, the maintenance they require can be extremely expensive. For small wind turbines like Watauga’s, annual upkeep alone can run several thousands of dollars, even before accounting for the cost of repairs after a breakdown. Think of it like a car; as it gets older, more things go wrong, and more things need to be fixed.

“Myself and a couple others did some research, contacted some people, were able to connect a computer to it, and got it fixed. It started working again and generating electricity,” said Shaw. “There was a website that Mr. Earl Shook knew about, I think it was at Kansas State University. They were housing a lot of data on these school turbines.”

Beyond wind energy, though, the school did gain another source of renewable energy: solar. On top of the concession stands by the football field lies an array of photovoltaic panels (solar panels) to help power the accessories below.

“That saves $80 bucks a month or something,” said Dr. Courtney Capozzoli, a science teacher and the advisor of Sustainability Club at WHS. “It pretty much powers the concession stand, which is, you know, like the refrigerator. So the sodas in the concession stand are cooled by the sun.” These solar panels are fully functional; you can actually view the live data from the panels online.

Funding Sustainability Isn’t Easy

Government incentives are often put in place and issued out to eligible organizations that are good candidates to utilize renewable green energy, such as schools, neighborhoods, and other organizations. However, these incentives typically aren’t intended to benefit individuals who wish to make their own property self-sustainable.

This doesn’t mean there isn’t any help, though. The vast majority of individuals who purchase solar panels for their home finance them with options such as solar loans, solar leases, and power purchase agreements (PPAs), each designed to make solar projects more accessible and affordable. Among these, solar loans are by far the most popular because they retain the most value, maximizing long-term savings.

A solar loan is functionally equivalent to any other home improvement loan: a bank lends you the money to pay off the system completely, and you pay the bank back through a series of set monthly payments over a set period of time, typically 10 to 25 years. Those who get a solar loan have the advantage of owning their panels. From the day the system is installed, your solar panels are considered an asset and are attributed to the value of your property. However, this also comes with the downside of requiring owners to do their own maintenance, which can add to costs.

In any case, the vast majority of homeowners still cannot afford to install solar panels themselves. According to a Forbes article by Jennifer Simonson, the average annual salary in the United States as of 2025 was $64,505, with the average hourly rate nationwide at roughly $30. In North Carolina, the average annual salary in 2025 was $62,440, 3% below the national average. At these rates, while the average salary exceeds the average combined cost for installation, it doesn’t make logical sense for an individual to invest in solar if it means their budget for everything else will be extremely tight by consequence. 

Putting Effort Where It Counts

Because solar is outside of the majority’s budget, and wind energy isn’t viable for individual use as the sole energy source in its current form, those worried about global warming and climate change are left with minimal options. While, again, government incentives exist, these aren’t meant to benefit small homeowners who simply want to minimize their carbon footprint as much as possible.

“There’s things we could do as a school community, like increasing pollinator gardens to make it more habitat-friendly, but that takes maintenance and a lot of people involved. But it’s still an idea:  ways to make the school grounds more ecologically diverse, increase biodiversity, make it more friendly for pollinators, et cetera,” said Capozzoli. “There’s ways as individuals to still contribute. Like making sure that you’re paying attention to what can be recycled and can’t be recycled.”

The core issue is that not enough people are aware of the situation for us to collectively work to remedy it. And even if they are, it requires more than just individual effort.

“In all honesty, when I think about individual actions, it’s never enough,” said Capozzoli. “I mean, the fair basic is we should all be doing this stuff. That’s not a pat on the back. But in reality, even if we all were not wasteful, if there’s not a top-down approach as well, if the corporations aren’t doing anything or the governments aren’t setting rules or incentives to shift behavior, there’s nothing we can do.”

Dr. Capozzoli discussed local examples before delving into what exactly can be done.

“For example, the Sustainability Club has considered why we still use Styrofoam trays, since those are remnants of COVID. Would it be that hard to go back to reusable trays or real forks? Think about how much money we could save,” said Capozzoli. “But it’s one thing to just go complain about the situation. It’s another to do your research, run the numbers, and understand what happens if we switch back to real trays and real silverware. What does that look like for the cafeteria workers? Does that mean we’ll need student workers during lunch to help run dishes? It’s really important to understand what it does to the people that actually have to do the work daily.”

Reaching goals of sustainability and conservation isn’t an individual effort, nor a goal that can be reached by a single community; it’s a collective effort that has to be agreed upon by the majority of the population. If collective effort isn’t made, collective progress isn’t met.“The environmental goals unfortunately seem to be pushed to the side, which is a bummer because we all benefit from having a healthy planet with less waste. So what can you do as students?” said Capozzoli. “It's paying attention to how you vote. It really does matter in what our communities look like, both on a local and global scale. How can we save the planet when we don't have good leadership? It takes good leadership and it takes individual action. And so, therefore, we have to make sure that we don't put people in charge that don't care at all.”

Building On Progress From Progress

Watauga High School’s LEED Silver certification shows that the building uses specific systems and technology to use less energy and save money. However, if the high school was scored in 2026, it would not achieve LEED Silver. In fact, even if the building were re-evaluated using the same v2007 system, it would not receive the certification it was awarded previously.

With that said, the systems and technology put in place to allow WHS to receive this certification are still here. It’s easy to look at broken turbines, nonfunctioning sensors, and funding gaps and come to the conclusion that the systems have failed. This isn’t false, but it also isn’t entirely true. While they might not function as intended, the foundation for change is still there because the systems were put there in the first place. Someone wanted something to change, so they made it change.

“It’s not an insurmountable challenge,” said Capozzoli. “It just takes a lot of committed effort that’ll have stability long-term. So just making sure the systems are set up to support it.”