What gets me is why haven’t school districts done this already? According to the story at the link:
The belt-tightening move could save nearly $100,000. Starting immediately, temperatures in the schools will now be set at 70 degrees during the day and 60 degrees at night. The lights will also be turned off in certain areas of school buildings when they’re not being used.
Crimeny, folks. This is something you should have been doing FOR YEARS, not when there is a budget crunch. This is the kind of horribly obvious stuff that should be done, and is probably part of the reason everybody is in a budget crunch right now: poor spending. I’m all for giving money to schools and other publicly-funded operations, but not the unneccessary spending stops. While you guys are turning off the lights, set it up so that all your computer monitors turn themselves off instead of running a stupid screen saver, and all computer go into low-power mode when not in use. Get rid of half the printers in the building (not everybody needs a printer on their desk) and then *gasp* you’ll be saving a bunch of money. Imagine that. Now if this was done YEARS ago (like it should have been), we wouldn’t have to hear stories about programs being cut and folks being laid off (at least not as many). There are a thousand ways that costs can be cut but your employees — your most valuable asset — should be at the bottom of that list.