The Willow School, Gladstone, N.J.

April 4, 2007

GLADSTONE, N.J. – Mark Biedron isn’t your average run-of-the-mill father. When he and wife Gretchen couldn’t find what they were looking for in a school for their first-born, they started their own.
Later, when it came time to start constructing classroom facilities, the founders’ beliefs in virtues-based education extended to the buildings themselves – so they asked their architects to build the greenest school building possible.
And, they achieved their goal by relying on a mix of cutting-edge design and recycled materials, including stone reclaimed from several 19th-century buildings.

WALKING THE WALK
Mark Biedron has probably always been a little bit ahead of the curve when it comes to environmental awareness. However, his greatest success with The Willow School may be showing its students how to walk the walk when it comes to caring for the natural world.
Biedron began his working career in the family paint business, which specialized in low VOC (volatile organic compound) paints and coatings. After selling that to a well-known paint manufacturer and working in that firm’s marketing department, he and a friend began Solid Wood Construction LLC.
“We started making homes out of barns that were going to be destroyed,” he explains. “We’d save the barn, bring it to New Jersey, reconstruct it and make a house out of it.”
Gretchen Biedron’s background is as a learning-disabilities specialist, and as the couple’s oldest child approached school age, the parents didn’t see any programs that provided what they were seeking.
“There are a lot of great schools that specialize in different aspects of education in our area,” Mark Biedron says. “We didn’t see any one school doing the combination of things we thought could happen so we decided to found a school.”
The Biedrons base their school on three basic principles: mastery of language, joy of learning combined with academic excellence, and virtuous relationships between humans. It’s the last that led to the couple’s – and the school’s – approach to sustainability.
“We developed a core virtue curriculum where we study one virtue every month at the school,” Biedron explains. “When we started talking about ethical relationships human-to-human, it got us looking outside.
“Contrary to what (Sir Francis) Bacon and (René) Descartes have been telling us about man versus nature, we believe we’re part of the natural systems, and our happiness is highly dependent on the happiness and well-being of the natural systems that surround us.
“If we’re going to be speaking about virtues to the children, we have to do it in the most virtuous and ethical habitat and we have to have an ethical relationship with our natural systems and our landscape,” he adds.

VISION QUEST
It’s from this perspective that the Biedrons began planning the first classroom building for The Willow School.
Located on a 34-acre site with mature landscaping and some wetlands, the couple committed to keeping the location as natural as possible. The original farmhouse and barn now house administration and library facilities, as well as mechanical systems.
To design the classroom building, the school hired Princeton, N.J.-based Farewell Mills Gatsch Architects. Firm principal Michael Farewell believes the choice came from reputation.
“We specialize in educational types of projects, from schools to universities,” he explains. “They were aware of our firm from having worked on other schools in the region, and they were aware that each of our projects is crafted for the individual place and the individual institution.”
Initially, Farewell says the Biedrons didn’t know specifically what they wanted from the building, other than something that was natural to the landscape and fostered intimacy and the educational experience they had in mind.
“They didn’t have the vision of this being a green building or a sustainable building,” says Farewell. “But, as we got more into it, Mark became more interested in green issues and steered the project in that direction. Eventually, it became a real mandate for the design.”
Biedron estimates the architects were 75-percent done with construction drawings when he learned about the United States Green Building Council (USGBC) and its Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED®) program
“We said, ‘Take a two-month time-out,’” Biedron says. “Then, we asked ourselves what it would take to build the greenest building they could possibly figure out.”
At that time, both the USGBC and LEED certification were quite new. Biedron says he began looking at every part of the building and asking what could be sourced from old material, what could have a high recycled content to it, and what was environmentally safe.
“There are really a lot of things that happen when you build a green building,” he says. “One of the big things is energy savings and that’s what everybody’s looking at right now. But, with a school, the idea was that we also wanted it to feel good in this building and for people not to get sick in this building.”
Biedron became an expert on sustainability, eventually becoming a LEED Certified Professional in the process. By the time he returned to the architects, the building had taken on a slightly different cast, although he says some parts of the 13,500 ft² classroom design didn’t require much tweaking.
“Luckily they had done a lot of things right to begin with,” says Biedron. “It wasn’t too radical a change.”
And, while the architects had not, at that point, done a LEED-certified building, Farewell says his firm was very interested in pursuing it with Biedron.
“It’s really a great pairing of space and mission,” says Farewell. “Mark was extraordinarily resourceful in terms of identifying areas to pursue, from locating the materials to exploring the energy issues to pushing the project toward the level it achieved.”
Ultimately, the building was only the second independent school in the United States to earn LEED Gold Certification when it was completed in 2003. A second structure, an 8,000 ft² arts building included in the Farewell Mills-created master plan, is now under construction, and Farewell and the Biedrons expect it will receive a Platinum designation when completed.

HAND-CRAFTED SPACES
Given his background and his interest – not to mention his own LEED certification – it’s not surprising that Biedron opted to act as his own contractor for the project through Solid Wood Construction.
One of his biggest challenges from that standpoint: using construction materials and methods that were new to local building officials.
“It was a challenge for everybody,” Biedron says. “The things we did were not typical construction methods, and we had to get things approved. We also had to do a lot of networking and research, but Farewell was very into it, and they did a great job.”
Among the architects’ main contributions is the orientation of the building.
“It’s a series of classrooms aligned in a linear order with a corridor that links them,” Farewell explains. “The building is configured so the corridor faces south for solar reasons and for daylighting reasons.”
The classrooms are paired under connecting roofs. The entry – between two pairs of the classrooms – is a large meeting space that serves as the core of the school at present. The architect describes the classrooms as barn-like in character.
“They’re made of mortise-and-tenon timber which has been salvaged from mills,” says Farewell. “They’re very handcrafted spaces and expressive of the materials that have gone into it.”
Barn-like or not – and the classrooms have peaked roofs and high ceilings – they’ve well-insulated and acoustically tight, thanks to 100-percent cotton sound insulation covered with wooden slats salvaged from 80-year-old marine pilings. Other ceilings are covered in tiles made from recycled newspapers and computer-printout runs.
In much the same way, the exterior of the classroom building and the arts building now under construction are made from reclaimed natural stone.
“They came from eastern Pennsylvania and were barns that were on property that was ready to be developed for housing,” Biedron explains. “We have a person who specializes in supplying salvaged stone, and our first building was about 75 percent hand-cut limestone and 25 percent sandstone mixture. We’re using the same thing on the second building to continue the theme.”
Biedron adds that he was referred to the stone supplier, the Orefield, Pa.-based Wood Natural Restoration, by someone he knew from Solid Wood Construction.
Kenneth Muth, Wood Natural Restoration’s founder and president, has been in the business of salvaging antique buildings since the late 1970s, and natural stone is one of his specialties.
Both he and Biedron explain that in many cases people ask to have the buildings removed, although in some cases Muth says he pays for the material. A good barn may yield 400-500 tons of stone, and the classroom building took the remains of two barns and a house.
“Much of this old stonework just falls over,” says Muth. “It wasn’t mortared together; instead people used a mix of clay and lime to fill the cracks where it didn’t join perfectly. We just remove the wood framing parts, push the walls over and then pick them up.”
Cleanup involves nothing more than washing with water, since most customers are interested in maintaining the old patina.
Other stonework includes bluestone flagstones disturbed from their original site by Boston’s Big Dig, and granite curbing from an interstate exchange in Connecticut. Actual construction was handled by an Amish mason from the Gladstone area.
“He’s doing the second building, as well,” says Biedron.
While the use of recycled materials for the project is impressive, the school places a heavy emphasis on recycling systems, as well. For instance, rainwater from the roof is collected and used to flush toilets, then sent to a manmade wetland filled with plants that absorb pollutants before being returned to the ground.
In much the same way, lights are on sensors and the heating and ventilation system – computer-controlled, of course – shuts down when the air outside is 65-80° F. At those times, a green light comes on in each classroom, telling the children it’s time to open the windows.
“It’s what we call opening up the comfort zone in the building,” Biedron says. “It’s our ‘Let’s dress a little differently rather than burning all these fossil fuels to keep the building at 72°’ approach.”
Currently, the Biedrons are working to incorporate all the lessons the buildings embody into the curriculum itself. Just as they’re incorporating a mastery of language into ever facet of their students’ studies, they want sustainability to be a framework to delivering knowledge.
“The question is how do you teach them,” Mark Biedron concludes. “What are the examples we can use to allow the children to want to learn this, to have an interest in it and it have a sense of wonder that will translate into authentic learning.”