Students enrolled at the Georgina Blach Intermediate School (Blach School) in Los Altos, California, walked into a newly remodeled, high-performance school facility in the fall of 2002. The remodeled Blach School – a demonstration project sponsored by Pacific Gas & Electric Company – showed how energy- and resource-efficient technologies could be successfully incorporated in a school renovation project. This project is one of the first schools in California to be designed and built to criteria developed by the nonprofit Collaborative for High Performance Schools, Inc. (CHPS). CHPS is a group of utility, government, and other organizations that provide high-performance design information, services, training, and incentives directly to California school districts and designers.

The Blach School, part of the Los Altos School District, serves 450 students in seventh and eighth grades. In 1999, the District began a renovation project to demolish 10,000 square feet of the original school and expand the remaining 34,000 square foot facility to 71,500 square feet, as well as modernize nine of the existing buildings. The expansion involved construction of three new classroom buildings, a performing arts building, and a gymnasium. The modernization project included the library, multi-purpose building, administration building, and four classroom buildings.