One Step Closer..

Within these last two weeks I have put in a lot of effort towards this project, but the up and coming weeks I will need to push a little harder in order to fulfill my goals. So far I believe my emails have been sent to spam and voice mails ignored because I have not gotten any feedback from the district office. In the mean time, I have had conversations with people in our high school main office these last two weeks about if there was any effort to install solar panels in the past, and I learned a lot about our district. Jessica Yang, a counselor at our high school, also believes that there should be solar panels at our high school and she finds the reason why we do not is ridiculous. She told me that a few years back it was brought up to the district office and the only reason why they decided against it was because it would "make our schools ugly." The PTSO group at our school was the organization that decided against solar panelling, which is ridiculous that they only think about how the school looks. It would honestly make our school look better to outsiders because it would show we are doing our part to become a greener school and help the environment. 

Besides that, I also talked to Susan Dini, secretary of our high school, and she was not exactly all-for having solar panels installed. She told me she had solar panels on her household roof and they have not paid themselves off yet. Mrs. Dini was the first person that I got to teach about my topic, which was a good trial run before I physically go into the District office. I laid out all the numbers and possible concerns and she was astounded at how much we would save. She reacted especially when I said that " 2.9% [of our government budget based on taxes] ($1,220,000) is used for new technology and supplies" which was a fact from our districts technology agreement. I told her that we use that money on just new monitors and upgrades to our systems that we do not necessarily need. If we install solar panels which would be at most $500,000 for our school, less than half of the technology budget, it would provide so much more energy and it would cut our utility bill to nothing, leaving more spending room in the future for better upgrades in our system or other campus improvements. Overall, Mrs. Dini was a great first run and now I think I'm ready to go up and talk to certain people at the district office since they will not respond to any of my attempts to reach out to them.

Some Accomplishments

This week I finally overcame that fear of getting the ball rolling, I finally took the first step and emailed a few important people. Although, a new arisen struggle from that is the reply. No one of who I emailed has replied and I have a feeling my email got stuck in the spam folder or lost in the sea of emails that they probably have going through each day. So now it has come down to phone calls, which had to be done anyways since all the district site is covered in phone numbers and bare in email.

I have also done a lot more research. On the district website I found the holy grail of research for my topic-- A technology agreement. It didn’t seem like much when I first opened it but I acquired a lot of really good informational numbers from it; such as, how much the government gives us annually, and what benefits we are getting, and what the district is planning to do to upgrade the technology. The thing that I saw with that though is that the district has all these plans to upgrade technology and install all these new gadgets, but the utility bill will skyrocket and it said nothing about energy consumption on that  technology agreement. Therefore, giving me that little push to make this topic more known for our district.

Getting the Ball Rolling

This week I did a lot of research on what schools actually have solar panels installed and projects trying to be put into action. On my first blog post "The Beginning of My Little Revolution" I stated how I saw Alameda Unified School District had students working on the same goal as this project,  I am currently trying to find an email where I can reach them and discuss their direct plan of action and how I can possibly use a similar path but configure it so it appeals to our districts board and so it can fit our possible budget. 

I've learned that I actually have a fear of letting a project become known to people who can put it into action, which has been a major setback for me. I need to get that little bit of courage to call the district office and see what we can do to possibly talk about how we can execute this project. Once I do get the ball rolling I cannot look back and falter. I believe in order to get that courage I need to do more research on the numbers and the process of it all. 

Overall, I am excited to see where this will go and the experiences I will get but until then I have to work hard at focusing on the goal. 

The Beginning of My Little Revolution

Blog 1:
Two mornings ago as I was laying on my couch watching the morning news sniffling of sickness, I see a blaring headline and the anchor reading "Solar Paneling in Silicon Valley Schools". Instantly I called for my mom, as she knew about my project, and told her "I've started a revolution!" she chuckled and walked away shaking her head at me. No I did not start a "revolution", at least not yet. This is a topic that has been ignored and not prioritized for too long, we need to see what we can do for our schools. Seeing this headline gave me a little more push to get this project really started.

You may be wondering what project I am talking about. My Anatomy/physiology class is doing a 20-time project, where we dedicate 20% of our class time a week to something that we wouldn't usually learn from that class. For my 20-time project I am researching on how to get bay area schools to convert to solar panels in order to save money and energy for the future of our education. I have already done some research on statistics with previously successful projects but now I need to create my own project.

This last week I reorganized my game plan based off of comments and suggestions from the "Shark Tank" presentations we had in class. In these presentations we had to present our 20-time project idea and how we will make a difference outside of the people in the classroom. Our teacher suggested that I interview our school district (which only holds two high schools) and see how much we spend on utility bills, which is a great idea for evidence in future presentations on how much money we could be saving.

I plan to educate some surrounding school districts on solar paneling and what it can do to improve the overall learning environment for the students coming in and out of our schools. If these districts are willing to listen to my plea then I want to show them how easy it would be to fund raise and make it a reality without breaking the districts budget.

So who knows, maybe I can start a little revolution.