By Evan Cooper 
Class of 2012
Ojai Valley School has again been recognized for its commitment to environmental activism, recently earning the state’s prestigious 2011 CalRecycle Waste Reduction Award (WRAP) for efforts to reduce waste, reuse materials and increase recycling.
This award follows a trend for OVS, which has received three major awards for environmental efforts in the past four years.
“We have been working for four years to reduce the trash we send out,” said environmental science teacher John Wickenhaeuser. “It’s a group effort and a challenge that we continue to face. Recycling still ends up in the trash so there is still room for improvement.”
But complacency has not set in at OVS, where over the holiday break, more efforts were taken to improve the efficiency and environmental friendliness of the school.
Highly efficient lights were installed in classrooms and new shower heads were also installed in all dorms and faculty apartments. The lights are expected to save more than 60,000 kilowatt hours per year, or around $10,000 annually in electricity costs. In addition, the shower heads are projected to save 250,000-318,000 gallons of water each year.
“We have put a whole process in place; from energy, water, fuel and local materials,” said MacAdam Lojowsky, the head of OVS’s maintenance department. “It is my goal to make OVS the greenest school in the state.”
OVS also recently installed a weather-controlled irrigation system at the Upper Campus, which should save about 600,000 gallons of water per year.
“We have been trying to accomplish a lot of these changes but it was not until (Mr. Lojowsky) came that things really started happening,” said Mr. Wickenhaeuser. “When we talk about integrity we talk about responsibility and by taking these actions we are holding to that.”