Solar Panels Installed at Irving School
Oak Park elementary students get first look at new energy technology.
Many thanks to Washington Irving Elementary School parent Jassen Strokosch for sending along these photos of students getting a glimpse of new solar panels before they were installed atop the school earlier this month.
Strokosch and others raised about $13,000 for the panels during a June 2011 fundraising race called the Chicago Ragnar relay, where a group of local parents ran from Madison, Wisc. back to Chicago.
Solar panels are just part of a larger greening effort at the school, called the Irving Schoolyard Project, which aims to make the school "a model of an urban ecological schoolyard," according to the Schoolyard Project's website.
Students have already planted and harvested a school garden, and plans for replacing the school's existing cement playground with green space remain in the works.
