K-12 School

Boy, thats a tough one Marcus - sorting out the potential drivers vs. non-drivers makes some sense, I agree. Even that sort isn't entirely clean because an argument could be made for excluding students entirely or for counting all students (I am imagining that many students are dropped off at school rather than ride the bus, which is a significant commute impact). I would almost be tempted to survey all three major populations (staff, 16+ students, under 16 students) and let GBCI tell you what the right mix is. But I think in the absence of specific guidance on how to treat this group, GBCI has to give some flexibility to applicants to use their best judgement. Sorry I don't have more definitive thoughts. Dan

I have this same question pertaining to a private K-12 school. My sense has always been that the survey would be handed out (in hard copy) to parents and/or students entering the facility and provided electronically to staff and faculty. Is there an update on this from LEEDuser or anyone else with a similar situation?

Hi Elliot. There's nothing dictating that you must use hard copy surveys to parents and/or students and electronic surveys to staff and faculty. It might be the most effective method for reaching the separate occupant groups, but it isn't required of you.

This is a gray area, but there are hints at the answer. According to SCAQMD rule 2202, a primary/secondary school that buses at least 2 students for each peak employee is EXEMPT from the commuter reduction program. While this is not the basis of the LEED standard, it does appear to reveal the logic of the standard: To my interpretation, the exemption for schools that have this level of busing is prima facie evidence that students would be included in the denominator of "regular occupants/employees" of the school, with some sort of student/faculty adjustment factor (maybe it's 2 students/faculty). In terms of how to classify students, it's not as though they have a choice to be in class. To me, this means that every "work" day, they must be there and must use some means to arrive. If buses are used for this, then that reduces the commuting footprint of occupants, regardless of whether they are able to drive or not. WRT carpooling, I would argue that only cars with more than one student, related or not, would qualify. SCAQMD requires documentation of busing percentages, so some sort of record keeping would be needed. I'm assuming that the buses keep track of who's on board and who's not, so you might be able to rely on that info rather than asking students to fill in a questionnaire. In terms of the number of respondents to the employee portion of the survey, you probably could use the basic survey quantity formula for the required number of respondents.

I'm going to state my question in a different context: I'm really trying to understand how to determine in this type of facility what GBCI would regard as an acceptable percentage of respondents out of the total "population" of students and staff/faculty. And I'm assuming there is a 1:1 relationship between students and staff/faculty. Thanks again.

The April 1, 2012 O&M Reference Guide addendum mostly addresses this issue: “Full-time students of driving age should be counted as commuters and their trip to school is considered their commute; students under the driving age should not be included in the calculation and cannot contribute to a carpool.” Therefore, you need to base your calculations on all driving age students as well as the faculty and staff. The combination of this student subset and employees produces the "full" building population. It's this population against which you'll determine a) the share of population you've reached (via surveying the entire population) and resulting extrapolation rate or b) what your sample size will be.