Members of the Marquette Area Public Schools Board of Education last week received some good advice from a Marquette Senior High School student on ways to save money on energy costs.

The student, Evan Bonsall, noted that, “It’s not something that simply applies to people who use a lot of energy or, you know, environmentalists or hippies or whatever. It’s something that applies to everybody, something that everybody should be conscious of.”

We couldn’t agree more.

Last year, principally using money from a state grant, school officials had an energy audit completed on district buildings. The 2014 study came a dozen years after a similar effort and it found the district was using significantly more energy than in 2002. That spurred the launch of what was called the KiloWatt Challenge, a friendly and good-natured competition between school buildings to reduce energy consumption.

An extention of the challenge was the formation of the Student Sustainability Committee, which consisted of 10 MSHS students from the student council and environmental club. Bonsall spearheaded the development of the committee, which finalized a list of seven specific projects, to incorporate recycling, energy efficiency and renewable energy into the district’s energy plan.

The projects range from low-cost efforts, such as fundraising with returnable bottles, implementing recycling bins and composting, to moderate costs like motion-sensitive lighting and LED overhead lamps. Bonsall’s comments to the board last week were a part of his committee’s efforts.

The good work by Bonsall, the committee he helped form and, indeed, the entire MAPS community is exactly what we like to see. Rather than simply accept the inevitability of ever-increasing energy costs, they went after the problem and found, by all accounts, workable solutions.

Others in both the public and private sectors could learn from their positive examples.