A computer with bar charts, pie charts and colorful graphs sits in the corner of Hilary Puckett’s science lab at Lake Highlands Elementary.

The images on the computer change if the wind blows harder, or if it rains, or if there’s a new moon cycle. The computer is hooked up to a weather station outside the school and reflects any change in the atmosphere. Puckett and other teachers at the school plan to use the system to teach students science, computer skills and math.

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“Textbooks are great,” Puckett says. “There are pictures we can see. We can see high winds in Oklahoma and pictures of tornadoes.”

But it all makes more sense if the students can learn through their real world, Puckett says. They can look out the window or go outside, and then see the corresponding barometric pressure, wind speed and direction, and humidity level on the computer.

The weather station does more than teach students in the classroom; it is part of a massive water conservation program that Richardson ISD implemented last year. A company called Interspec developed the program, and has worked closely with the district, Lake Highlands Elementary and a handful of other schools where weather stations were installed to make sure everything is working – in and out of the classroom. The real-time weather information provided by each station is plugged into a computerized irrigation system, and every school campus in the district is watered based on the information received. It is very precise, and once the determined water amount is reached, the system cuts off, preventing over watering.

Phil Lozano, associate director of facility services for RISD, says district officials realized something had to be done about water conservation. The school district is the largest water consumer in the city of Richardson. When things really dried up a few years ago, RISD cut back to minimum watering, basically just athletic fields, and Lozano still got a call from someone in Richardson’s public works department asking if the district could cut back more.

“The fact that water is a nonrenewable resource, it’s a very precious resource,” Lozano says. “It’s not like rubber, where we can go make more. It’s all dependent on God.”

In addition to the watering system, Lozano says drip irrigation and low trajectory watering systems have been installed in some schools.

The program has resulted in water savings of about 15 percent a month, Lozano says.

“It was the district that moved ahead on it,” Lozano says. “That’s pretty awesome. It’s very, very forward and progressive thinking.”

But the fact that the whole system could be tied back to the classroom has made it work on every level for the district.

“Weather is something we teach from kindergarten to 12th grade,” Puckett says. “This is great to teach from. You can’t get more visual than this, unless you’re standing outside.”