Good practice:

Green Schools competition

The Green Schools Competiton aims at improving the energy performance of the school buildings managed by the Province of Treviso by raising the awareness and changing the behaviour of school builiding users, so that they can contribute, through concrete actions, to reduce energy consumption and carbon footprint. In fact, it is demonstrated that a responsible energy behaviour can reduce energy consumption up to 8% in a building, besides having important educational implications. Every year the Province of Treviso holds a competition addressed at the 41 schools - hosted in the 100 school buildings the Province manages and maintains. The schools can participate in the competitioin on a voluntary basis by implementing energy saving actions, regulated by specific criteria, which are evaluated and awarded by a Commission. The latest editions were organized after the logic of the Living Lab. The competition is based on the participation in 3 categories: - reduction of the electricity consumption - best Energy Teams - Sustainable Coach. After the evaluation of the projects presented by the schools, the Commission draws up the ranking of all the participating schools and prizes are given to the best ranking ones. This project was born within the framework of the third generation Global Service project-GSI Green Schools, i.e. external service contracted for the energy management and maintenance of the secondary school and institutional buildings of the Province of Treviso.

50.000,00 euros, considering about 20.000 euros for prizes and 30.000 euros for the external service and the staff costs for organizing and managing the competition.

The practice has achieved positive results in terms of: raising the awareness of students, teachers and school adimnistrative staff about the themes of energy saving and CO2 reduction; little but constant energy saving, economic saving and improvement of the carbon footprint of the school buildings involved; in particular, between 2017-18, the last one for which the data are available, the involved schools registered total electricity savings for kWh 16.250.645 and 5.899 tons of CO2 reduction.

The main challenges encountered in the implementation of the Green Schools project have been: - the difficulty of getting schools to participate in the competition; - the capacity to guarantee the continuity of schools' participation throughout the years.

The Green Schools Competition is a good practice with good potential to be effectively trasferred to other similar contexts: it could be adaptaed to different educational levels and different models of managing the public building stock.