By Darien Clary��

It’s a late afternoon in May, and the Texas heat settles over the city like a heavy blanket, taxing aging HVAC systems. Inside, students collaborate on projects, teachers guide discussions, and campuses work hard to maintain the comfortable learning environments as rising temperatures place growing demands on buildings and infrastructure. The Austin Independent School District (Austin ISD) is working to ensure these environmental factors do not limit a student’s potential. Through its bond programs, the district isn’t just building classrooms, it’s creating sustainable learning environments with clean air, efficient cooling, natural light, and shaded outdoor areas so students can stay focused and ready to thrive.��

Sustainability is a driving force behind Austin ISD’s mission to prepare every student with the knowledge and skills to thrive in college, career and life. The district’s schools sit at the center of Austin’s most pressing environmental challenges, including extreme heat, air quality, equitable access to green space and the responsible use of limited public resources. Austin ISD approaches sustainability as a shared responsibility — one that supports student learning, environmental stewardship and community well-being.��

Make Sustainability a Non-Negotiable��

Too often, sustainability is approached as a “nice-to-have” instead of a fundamental part of building performance, which can make features targets for cuts with tight budgets. A solution to this can be found in Austin ISD’s Educational Specifications (Ed Specs), a board-approved document defining what every modernized campus must be. Every major construction project under the 2017 and 2022 Bond Programs must pursue Austin Energy Green Building (AEGB) and/or LEED certification. Additionally, the Ed Specs mandate 100% LED lighting with daylight sensors, energy-efficient HVAC, water-efficient fixtures, solar-ready roofs, and outdoor learning environments. When board members approved the Ed Specs, they made sustainability non-negotiable.��

Let the Community Define Sustainability��

Green building standards set the bar for resource efficiency and building performance, but sustainability is ultimately about people. Austin ISD centers a simple question: sustainable for whom? By working with the community, the district ensures every student has access to healthy, high-performing and inspiring learning environments that work for them.��

To do this, Austin ISD convenes a Campus Architectural Team (CAT) composed of teachers, parents, students and community members for every modernization project. They are co-designers, and what they know about their community shapes decisions no energy model can account for: which outdoor spaces will actually be used for learning, how a building should feel to the people spending their days inside it and what community values can be reflected in the design.��

An example of this process is designed by Perkins&Will. From the beginning, the CAT brought together staff, students, families, and alumni of the original L.C. Anderson High School, a cornerstone of East Austin’s African American community until its closure in 1971. What emerged is more than a high-performing building. Historic materials were salvaged and re-integrated, spaces like the original cafetorium were reimagined for modern learning, and the story of L.C. Anderson lives on through galleries. Paired with daylighting, efficient systems and reduced water use, the result is a school that reflects environmental responsibility and sustains cultural continuity.��

What It Looks Like in Practice��

At , designed by PBK Architects and modernized as part of the 2017 Bond Program, every dollar saved on energy is a dollar that stays focused on students, inside the classroom. Govalle now uses less energy per square foot than 95% of schools in the nation, according to data collected by the . That performance is driven by high-efficiency HVAC, a well-insulated building envelope and LED lighting paired with daylighting sensors. Heritage trees were preserved to cool the schoolyard and also help mitigate heat-island effect. Enhanced ventilation, high-efficiency air filtration, and low-emitting materials support strong indoor air quality, ensuring that efficiency gains also translate into healthier spaces.����

Govalle’s results are not isolated. Across the district, Austin ISD has avoided $15.4 million in energy costs and $6.7 million in water and wastewater costs since 2017 through sustainable design and resource conservation.��

Darien Clary is the Director of Sustainability, Energy & Environment at Austin ISD.

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“The School of Life Sciences wants to build learning environments that go away from the lecture hall environment, where we believe students are passively engaged, and allow students to be actively engaged. If they have better academic content, they can retain it longer instead of forgetting it two seconds after they leave class,” said Kegan Remington, instructional technology analyst at the university.

The classroom, built for the School of Life Sciences, holds 96 students grouped into tables of six, and one 23-inch touch-screen computer is available for every two students. Not only can students create documents in groups in real time, they can share them with the rest of the class using the room’s four projectors. Polling questions, open-ended questions and even drawing questions can be evaluated and used to create discussions throughout the classroom.

“The students love it. All the technology in that room is comparable to what they carry around in their pockets. In other classrooms, they’re lucky if computers are there at all,” Remington said. “The student response has been that [this learning environment] makes them feel more confident going into testing because teachers can isolate misconception on the spot. We thought students would maybe be intimidated by it, but they like it and have matured enough to really think about the way they learn.”

As for the teachers, the university is getting mixed reviews, not because of quality, but because of the new teaching methods required in the interactive classroom “It’s difficult to change the ways someone’s been teaching for 20 to 30 years. [This classroom] takes a different kind of teaching style that involves guiding students instead of just regurgitating content,” Remington said. “We’re starting to create new curriculums, even partnering with companies like Pearson to get students thinking in a more visual way.”

Construction of the facility began in February 2012. Dick & Fritsche Design Group, headquartered in Phoenix, was the architect, and Mesa-based SD Crane Builders served as the general contractor.

The $625,000 classroom was a “pretty in depth construction project,” Remington said. The construction team had to tear apart an old room, which previously was used as a lichen herbarium and stored a large research collection that has since been moved off campus. The room contained algae and mold, as well as had a lot of infrastructure problems that were not updated since the facility was originally built in the 1960s.

The team had to pull out all the electrical and data wiring to prepare for the wireless network points and A/V equipment required to build the room. The new technology also required more bandwidth, so they had to install wired infrastructures in order for every computer and device to have a network connection. “The old classroom only had a couple of electrical outlets, which don’t fly anymore. I can’t even count the number of electrical outlets in the room now,” Remington said.

ASU as a whole has already taken notice of the classroom’s effect on learning, and another classroom like it is in the construction planning phase through the college of Liberal Arts and Sciences, said Remington. Within the School of Life Sciences, there is already talk of building more, but likely on a smaller scale — for now.

ASU isn’t the only school to approach this kind of learning. In fact, the classroom is modeled after two different kinds: one from the University of Minnesota and one from ASU’s chemistry department that has the same concept of pods, but was built four or five years ago without as up-to-date technology. Although Remington cited these other examples, he believes that ASU is at the forefront of pushing the capabilities of this type of environment by making it more available to students.

Of course, for a school of about 76,000 students, it will be difficult to give everyone access to this type of learning environment, but the university is trying to find ways to give students the best of both worlds by in the future possibly assigning specific weeks for students to be in the more interactive classroom setting. “We’re trying to give access to as many students as humanly possible,” Remington said.

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