BY AMY HODGES
Rice News staff

This week the Houston Independent School District (HISD) kicked off a new sustainability initiative, thanks to help from some Rice Owls.

Brown College senior Rowan Canter has spent the last several months as a Center for Civic Engagement (CCE) fellow. During his fellowship, he has worked directly with HISD to develop a sustainable energy model for The Green School Challenge, a school competition designed to promote long-term behavioral changes, create awareness, reduce energy consumption and water usage and increase single-stream recycling of waste.

Canter became involved with the project via Bob Stein, the Lena Gohlman Fox Professor of Political Science and academic director of the CCE. The project was a natural fit for the political science and environmental policy studies and sustainability major. “I went to Professor Stein and told him I wanted to do some political science research for the summer, and I told him my interest was in sustainability,” Canter said. “Luckily, he’d just gotten this request and passed it on to me.”

Canter then submitted a proposal to the CCE and was accepted to work on the project over the summer.

“Rowan was an ideal student to work with,” Stein said. “Not only did he have the analytic, computational, oral and written skills needed to undertake this project, but he really has a dramatic interest in this.”

Stein also lauded Canter’s work ethic. “He did an extensive amount of research and showed the tenacity and persistence to get the information he needed,” Stein said. “He toured the schools and physical plants and really began to appreciate what the administrators, teachers and students confronted by engaging in this type of sustainable behavior.”

Over the course of the project, Canter worked under the supervision of Gavin Dillingham, HISD’s energy manager and a 2004 Rice alum. Together, they worked to develop the model by evaluating a number of variables of buildings throughout the district to predict what their energy consumption should be. The model is the first of its kind for the HISD and was developed specifically for the region’s climate.

“We believe that taking simple steps in the way we operate our schools will result in significant savings for the district — savings that can be used to further improve our schools,” Dillingham said.

Stephanie Post, executive director of the CCE, said this endeavor has been a perfect example of the types of experiences they try to coordinate for students. “This is exactly the kind of outcome we envision for these projects,” she said. “The result is something tangible the partner can use and a wonderful experience for the students.”