Seattle Public Schools has an innovative shared savings program which compares utility use school by school across the district. Schools earn a financial award for conserving energy, water, or solid waste compared to the previous year or by meeting their conservation goals. 80 out of 84 schools were awarded funds totaling $84,875. The amount of energy conserved is equivalent to powering 110 homes per year. I wonder what each school does with their earnings from the shared savings program. Do they reinvest it towards more green initiatives? Another virtuous cycle? This process takes some really detailed tracking systems. Seattle, along with many other school districts, supported by Puget Sound Energy's Resource Conservation Manager program, uses software called Utility Manager to print reports and measure savings over time. And they use energy-inerval service software to graph electricity or gas use at 15-minute intervals, allowing for very discrete adjustments, building by building minute by minute. And even cooler, all of these systems can be managed from one central location, with a program called Direct Digital Control. A standout among the RSTM programs is the Lake Washington School District. The Resource Conservation Manager's annual report is informative and easy to read. It's 38 pages long and walks you through the following system report. Electricity, natural gas, solid waste, and the three water systems, water supply, waste water, and storm water. The charts and graphs are all telling the same story. The Red Barge shows how many kilowatt hours of electricity were used month by month during the 2008-2009 school year. And the blue bars show that a lot less electricity was consumed during the 2009-2010 school year. See, they're all shorter because month by month less electricity is being consumed. And then this graph shows the same seasonal trends over five years. The high point in each cluster of months is wintertime, when we use extra electricity for heating. But notice that the general trend, the broad bulky shoulders in each year's cluster of 12 months, is going down over the five year reporting period, which means that the whole Lake Washington School District is getting better and better at using less and less energy. Of course, the greenest buildings in the watershed, like Z-Home and Isoquat and the Berge schools new science wing on Capitol Hill, achieve net zero energy for the same annual cycle. That's not even a graph. That's zero, with a zero. So even a leading school district like Lake Washington has a long way to go. We need to keep measuring these trends. I wonder if we could speed things up if we integrated awesome annual reports, like the one from Lake Washington School District, with the Green School's movement, with what's actually happening in the classroom, the curriculum itself. Each school districts, annual RCM report, could be distributed digitally, of course, to save paper, to every classroom as part of a local living textbook, so that students apply their academic skills while helping to conserve resources even more effectively, and they would be motivated because they would know what all the numbers actually mean. It's kind of obvious.