A teenager’s thoughts on making the town’s first high school “greener” may not resolve school colors and mascot issues, but school officials may use some of them for the environment’s sake.

At a School Board presentation last week, KW Management President Mark Weissflog outlined possibilities to build a wind and solar power facility at the new high school with costs ranging up to $1.1 million.

Superintendent Frank Bass said the 10-kilowatt turbine seemed the most attractive to the school district at a cost of $300,000, particularly if alternate funding sources are found without hitting taxpayers with a brunt of the cost.

The windmill would offer students an educational model for alternative energy sources while reducing 5 percent of energy costs at the school as it produces energy that would be sold back to power companies, Bass said.

“That’s what I’m most interested in,” Bass said. “It’s not the miniscule savings we’ll get on our energy bill, it’s the educational opportunities and partnerships with science that we’ll form in the process.”

The project, which was first suggested to the school district by 13-year-old David Hutchings, came to fruition after a group of middle schoolers researched turbine and solar energy options for their FIRST Lego League competition this past year.

“We had to pick a building to do an energy audit on it and try to find something to make it more green and better on energy,” Hutchings said.

To make their project more effective, Hutchings said the group picked a building still under construction – Windham High School. The group then followed through with their proposal, since the high school’s location was wind-rich and sunny on top of one of the town’s highest hills.

Reaching out to Weissflog and later touring the construction site, the project appeared even more feasible, prompting construction site manager Glenn Davis to begin preparations to make such a facility possible.

Bass said he’s already been approached by community members interested in forming a study committee to make the project possible by pursuing grants and donations through the school district’s Endowment Committee.

“We feel relatively confident we can do this by approaching foundations and acquiring grants,” he said.

Possibilities of installing cellular tower equipment on the tower could also lend itself to alternative funding, Bass said.