Mercer Island School District is one of the largest school districts in the state to achieve compliance with the Clean Buildings Performance Standard (CBPS) including Mercer Island High School, which exceeds 220,000 square feet.
“This milestone reflects three years of dedicated collaboration between the district’s facilities team, led by Director of Maintenance, Operations, and Facilities Tony Kuhn, Hargis Engineers, Puget Sound Energy (PSE) and ATS Automation,” said Kathy Zurawski, Capital Projects Coordinator for Mercer Island School District. “This accomplishment demonstrates what’s possible through teamwork, innovation, and a commitment to a greener future for students and the broader community.”
Kathy led efforts in data analysis, optimizing building systems, and worked in partnership with community stakeholders to ensure compliance and drive energy efficiency across the district. “Because we had joined PSE’s CSEM program the previous year or so, we had already made many improvements that helped us reach our EUI goals,” said Zurawski.
Hargis supported the district with no-cost HVAC control upgrades to address elevated EUI performance, but then immediately moved into the energy audit phase to adhere to the CBPS timeline.
During the assessment, the district found that updates to the HVAC control systems improved building efficiency enough for the buildings to meet CBPS requirements, making energy audits unnecessary.
This reinforced the importance of maintaining good HVAC controls as their impact on overall building performance can often be significant.
“Our maintenance and operations team, led by Tony Kuhn, is second-to-none. Systems that should have been replaced 10 years ago continue to operate, and thanks to their ingenuity, do so as efficiently as possible,” said Superintendent Fred Rundle.
The district gave a big shout-out to their Maintenance and Operations team: Steve Baird, Shannon Allen and Dana Parkey who they mentioned played a key role in putting energy-saving improvements into action. While challenges remain — particularly with aging infrastructure — the district says it will continue to pursue forward-thinking maintenance practices and employee engagement to extend the impact of its energy conservation efforts.
The Clean Buildings team continues to receive success stories from building owners and their teams and look forward to sharing them with you. If you would like to have your success story featured in an upcoming bulletin or our website, please fill out this short questionnaire.