If you or your little sibling were in the portable classroom during middle school, there's a good chance that the roof of that classroom spent its days doing nothing for anyone except soaking up sunlight, sunshine collected for free and put to no good use. The "practical" appearance of that gray asphalt shingle roof could have been found in many classrooms nationwide. Still, a 1999 Florida Solar Energy Center study titled “Evaluation of Energy Efficiency Improvements to Portable Classrooms in Florida,” at Silver Sands Middle School in Port Orange, found that the roof was silently raising the cooling costs and making the room less conducive to learning. The solution was pretty simple. Scientists replaced the gray roofing shingles on two mobile classrooms with white metal roofing panels and monitored the results for two years.
The classroom nobody wanted to sit in and the solution
