DURANGO, Colo. — A school district in the Four Corners is taking advantage of the 300+ days of sun and shifting to a popular trend. They’re getting solar panels on its school and switching to solar energy.

The Durango School District plans to get started on the work to get the school moving to solar as early as next month. Even though they may not be the first school district in Durango to go green, they’re happy to put their name on the list.

“Super exciting. It was really a no-brainer once we ran the numbers and saw that we could really do this within our operating budget,” said Christopher Coleman, a Durango School District chief of operations officer. 

Durango School District partnered with Veregy LLC. in Durango to make the $7.2 million project happen, starting at some schools as soon as next month.

The project is set to replace LED lighting at eight different schools, and implement solar panel for six different school out of 11 in their district.

“So the reason was that LPEA determine a couple of feeders in certain neighborhoods that could not withhold or withstand the demand load to add the solar. So basically it’s an infrastructure problem,” said Coleman. 

The school district has been working on the budget neutral project for quite some time. With the help of Veregy they were able to anticipate the overall saving cost.

“Over the course of 20 years, which is the life of the loan that the district took out to fund this project, that we will save about $8.5 million net savings. The solar panels themselves have a life span of 40 years and over the course of 40 years the projection is near $18 million in savings,” Coleman said. 

The school district is the second-largest employer in La Plata County. 

“Clearly it’s going to help the district and save the district money but at the end of the day to save the taxpayers’ money,” Coleman said. 

The start of this project won’t interrupt any learning. Most of the construction will take place in the summer and is set to end by the end of 2024.

“It was important to us that this had minimal to no disruption to the learning environment, and I’m happy to say it worked,” said Coleman.