A description of the acoustic requirements in LEED for Schools and a comparison to the ANSI S12.60 Classroom Acoustics Standard

The Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) rating system developed by the U.S. Green Building Council (USGBC) has become the standard method of rating the energy efficiency and sustainability of green buildings in the United States. LEED was initially developed for rating newly constructed commercial buildings, but ratings systems for other building types have also been developed. USGBC has just released LEED for Schools, which has a particular focus on K-12 educational facilities. In this paper, the acoustic requirements of the new LEED for Schools and ANSI S12.60 are compared and some of the reasons for the differences are explained. LEED for Schools is based heavily on ANSI S12.60, but the requirements for background noise level and external window sound transmission class (STC) have been relaxed in LEED for Schools and there are no requirements for impact isolation class (IIC) at all. One other major difference in LEED for Schools is the option to meet a required RC Mark II background noise level instead of a simple A-weighted background noise level.