D.C. officials hope to give District students and construction workers in training a leg up for future job openings with a new curriculum that addresses environmental trends in the exploding green building industry.
The course is a primer on green building – the effort to design, build and operate facilities that use less energy and place less strain on the environment than traditional practices. It is geared, officials said, to the future “lunch bucket” construction worker who will need at the very least a basic understanding of environmentally friendly construction practices.
“We are going to go beyond just teaching young people a trade,” Mayor Adrian Fenty said during a news conference outside Cardozo High School. “We’re going to teach them how to learn, work and appreciate green collar jobs.”
The curriculum, titled “Your role in a green environment,” will be taught to about 100 students in Cardozo’s Academy of Construction and Design, and more than 500 adults apprenticing in various construction trades. It was developed through a partnership between the Green Builders Council of D.C. — a coalition of area construction firms — and the National Center for Construction Education and Research.
“The jobs are there,” said at-large D.C. Councilman Kwame Brown, chairman of the economic development committee. “The training’s not. Now there’s an infrastructure.”
There are “abundant opportunities” for skilled green builders, said Steven Donohoe, president of the Donohoe Construction Co. The curriculum, he said, will “give the people of this city an edge in the marketplace.”
D.C. requires through its Green Building Act that major new construction projects, both public and private, meet environmental standards known as Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design, or LEED. More than 100 buildings in the District, totaling about 120 million square feet, are already LEED certified and another 200 million square feet is in the pipeline for development, officials said.
