Excellent facilities not only attract quality-seeking faculty and applicants, they also help teachers and students to do their best work once they're at Cate. New buildings and renovations on the Mesa will better serve the compelling and ever-expanding human activities—intellectual, social, artistic, and athletic—that make Cate such an extraordinary School.

For this reason, the Centennial Campaign is supporting numerous improvements to the Mesa.  There is, however, another agenda driving Centennial Construction projects: sustainability and Cate's ongoing commitment to the preservation and protection of the environment.  Our founder, Curtis Wolsey Cate, had a deep respect—a reverence—for the natural world, and stewardship of the environmental and natural resources was one of the basic tenets of his educational philosophy.

The Cate Board of Trustees, Headmaster, and administration are proud to be carrying on this tradition of stewardship through the Centennial Campaign.  During the ongoing course of various Centennial Construction projects (described below) the School has faced myriad choices; many of these choices have had both great financial and great environmental implications.  Cate is proud to have made, all along the way, choices which confirm our commitment to protect the world around us.

In many cases, these choices will save the School money over time.  In other instances, Cate has chosen more expensive options because these are the more environmentally responsible.  What follows is partial list of capital projects funded by the Centennial Campaign, including information about just a few of the compelling choices Cate has made.

Faculty Housing

Having faculty live on campus is absolutely essential to the 14-16 hours of work they do every day, absolutely essential to the student-teacher relationships that are at the heart of the School, and absolutely essential to our mission. Cate has built five new LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design*) Platinum-certified faculty homes.  (See the enclosed brochure for more detailed information.)  In addition, the location of Cate faculty on the Mesa reduces, in perpetuity, the environmental impacts of five additional families commuting to-and-from work every day.

Childcare Facility

With over forty children of faculty and staff on the Mesa, there is a substantial need for a childhood education center. The LEED Gold-certified Emmett-Nieman Early Childhood Learning Center opened its doors in the spring of 2009.  The ELC utilizes the same products, design techniques, and technologies featured in the LEED-certified faculty homes.  (As a "commercial" building, it faces slightly different standards.) In addition to the gold certification and reduced commuting impacts (Cate teachers do not have to drive their children to daycare), the ELC staff contributes to Cate's environmental mission by teaching our community's youngest members the lifelong habits of reducing, reusing, and recycling through its thoughtful program.

Wastewater Treatment Plant

Cate has replaced its aging wastewater treatment facility with a state-of-the-art tertiary wastewater treatment plant. The benefits of the new plant include: 100% reclamation of water for irrigation resulting in a $70,000 (or 50%) annual savings in the School's water costs; a vast reduction in Cate's use of public water resources; new field space for baseball and softball (as the former above-ground overflow effluent storage pond was replaced by an underground storage tank); and a markedly more environmentally sound process that will affect not only our campus but the areas that catch the Mesa's runoff, including the ocean.

The Emmett-Horowitz Aquatic Center

Ground has been broken for a new aquatic center including a pool that meets CIF swimming and water polo specifications, a recreational pool, and a pool building with locker facilities and a state-of-the-art training center. Cate is utilizing the very latest technologies in both the construction of this facility and the equipment which will be used to maintain it in the expectation of LEED certification (in the short term) and impactful environmental protections and fiscal savings as the years pass.  These technologies include a Capstone ™ microturbine generator.  The microturbine, fueled by "clean" natural gas, will create enough electricity to provide power not only to the Aquatic Center, but also (as with the electricity from the solar panels on the faculty homes) feed power back into Cate's own electric grid.  

Traditional, offsite power plants (whether they use "dirty fuels" such as coal or "clean" energy sources such as nuclear power) lose a great deal of energy in the process of creating and transporting vast amounts of power across great distances, resulting in an estimated efficiency rate of only 28%.  These power plants also disperse the heat generated by energy production into adjacent oceans and lakes, thus wasting that heat and greatly disturbing local ecosystems.  The localized Cate microturbine will not only operate at a greater efficiency (80% as opposed to 28%) but also disperse its byproduct heat into the pools, providing 40% of the heat required to make the pools comfortable for swimming and other water sports.  The School anticipates a $40,000 a year savings in energy costs resulting from the purchase of the microturbine which, in addition, will also serve as an emergency generator for the School's lift station.

Relocations, Renovations, and Infrastructure Changes

As part of an overall vision for how the Mesa should evolve over the next generation, the School has undertaken the reorganization and, in some cases, upgrading of existing facilities.  Making way for the Emmett-Horowitz Aquatic Center, the ceramics studio and the historic Reginald Johnson Stables have been moved to the north side of the Mesa – a site more in keeping with their location relative to the original school buildings built in 1929.  Recycled, restored, and refurbished, the Stables are also now re-purposed; they now efficiently house Cate's Outdoor Program and the Buildings and Grounds Offices. In order to better utilize the Mesa and to prepare for the long-term future, the Centennial Campaign is also funding roadwork, a new parking lot, new baseball and softball fields, and the shifting of the soccer and lacrosse fields. The resulting green space in the heart of the campus, which will be known as the Kirby Quadrangle, will embody Cate's commitment to the natural world and the environment both in spirit and function.

In the process of this reconfiguration, the School has replaced older, less efficient, and (in some cases, environmentally harmful) materials with more modern, sustainable products.  One example is the replacement of old PVC (polychloroethanediyl) piping, which degrades and leaks toxic dioxin into the environment, with much more durable and impermeable HDPE (high density polyethylene) for irrigation in the Kirby Quadrangle and surrounding areas.  While this choice has added about 30% more to original construction estimates, it has longer-term ramifications the School cannot ignore - down the road, HDPE will last longer and do no damage to the Mesa.

Another example of responsible environmental engineering is the incorporation of bioswales into the Kirby Quadrangle and new construction zones.  In semi-arid climates such as Cate's, periodic rainfall during much longer stretches of dry weather results in the buildup of environmental hazards (such as oil, other chemicals, and even natural wastes) on impervious surfaces, such as roads, sidewalks, and even roofs.  When rain does fall, a concentrated sludge of pollutants is swept into natural channels (such as streams and creeks) and out to sea.  The bioswales, a complex series of channels engineered through a mixed use of natural and man-made materials, effectively gather and filter water in any amount, sheeting it into ever-larger channels which, eventually, feed "scrubbed" water into existing creeks and streambeds.  The bioswales will also, over time, become "natural wetlands," attracting and sustaining the various riparian animal and plant species native to the area.  When this happens, the Mesa bioswales will become a protected habitat for endangered (and potentially) endangered species.  

Like so many of the other sustainable choices Cate has made over the course of Centennial Construction, this is a win-win-win—for the environment, of course, but also for Cate students, who will have opportunities to observe and study a protected habitat, and finally for the School.  Short term expense in constructing bioswales will alleviate the need for longer term investment in artificial filtration plants years later, when pending environmental regulations will call on all of us to make a deeper commitment to protecting our surroundings.  When that time comes, Cate will have already proven its commitment, thanks to the Centennial Campaign.
          
*LEED is an internationally recognized green building certification system,~providing third-party verification that a building or community was designed and built using strategies aimed at improving performance across all the metrics that matter most: energy savings, water efficiency, CO2 emissions reduction, improved indoor environmental quality, and stewardship of resources and sensitivity to their impacts.
Developed by the [ http://www.usgbc.org/About ]U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC), LEED provides building owners and operators a concise framework for identifying and implementing practical and measurable green building design, construction, operations and maintenance solutions.