The Principal selection process is officially over. We are proud to announce that William Klee has accepted a four year contract as the incoming Principal for Burr Elementary School.
Thank you to all of our LSC members for dedicating so much time and energy toward the Principal selection.
April 14, 2010|By Pam DeFiglio, Special to the Tribune
On the roof of Burr Elementary School, about 75 feet above ground, a new wind turbine spins, and solar panels soak up the sun.
Inside, Doug Snower, a wind energy expert, points out a wall-mounted monitoring station that teaches about sustainable energy by letting students see how much power comes in and think about creative ways to use it, such as firing up their iPods or heating a fish tank.
“We’re really excited to have this. It’s going to be a great learning resource for the children,” said Vinita Scott, principal of Burr, a K-8 school in the Bucktown neighborhood on the Northwest Side.
Snower and his partners in a startup wind energy company worked with Scott on the project, paid for through a grant. It includes the first wind turbine in the Chicago Public Schools system and one of the first on a school in the Chicago area.
While a number of environmental pioneers have put wind turbines and solar panels on their homes to reduce their electric bills, the Burr project is more about having children grow up with sustainable technologies, Snower said.
“If we can start students learning about this technology when they’re at a young age, it could spark great ideas, and maybe they’ll find ways to use it that we can’t even imagine now,” said Snower, who has a wind turbine on his Highland Park home. “If I’d started with this when I was 7 years old, I could probably have invented something cool by now.”
Today’s elementary school children will learn that the wind turbine and solar panels produce electricity and feed it, via wires, to a power closet next to the energy education station. They will see meters that show how many watts each device is producing and can graph the data, Snower said, then use it for science and math learning. They also can chart how weather affects the amounts of wind and solar power that can be produced in Chicago’s climate.
That might have been as far as it went. In fact, Snower’s own children were interested to see how many watts the wind turbine on their home produced, he said, but they didn’t really know what else to do with it.
Instead, Snower and Vince Kamin, a longtime friend and Burr alumnus, enlisted another friend, Peter Exley, to make the connection between the electricity produced on the roof to light bulbs going on in children’s minds.