The $94 million school opened in August 2025 with an all-electric, net-zero design and a clean-energy project town officials call Winchester’s largest.
The small red propellers did not spin until students stepped into the sun.
Outside the Lynch Elementary School, fourth graders held palm-sized solar panels wired to tiny motors, testing what happened when light hit the panels, when a hand blocked them and when the devices were tilted away from the June glare.
The experiment was simple enough to fit in a child’s hands, but it pointed back toward the larger system above and around them: the solar panels on their new school, the heat pumps on the roof, the ceiling cassettes in their classrooms and the town investment behind it all.
Ken Pruitt, Winchester’s sustainability director, led the tour on June 8, as students moved through the school’s energy systems, turning the building itself into a science lesson.
In classrooms, the cafeteria and the outdoor classroom, Pruitt asked questions before giving answers, pushing students to connect the equipment around them to the energy unit they had studied in class.
“What do you guys think is up here?” Pruitt asked, as students gathered near the solar panels outside.
Monday’s visit was organized with help from Lia Stelljes, Winchester Public Schools’ elementary science, technology and engineering coordinator, who said she saw a natural fit between the new building and fourth-grade science standards on renewable energy, energy transfer, electric currents, heat and solar energy.
Stelljes said she had attended one of Pruitt’s community tours and thought the same material could make science more tangible for students.
“What a perfect opportunity to have students kind of get to know really how their building works and connect it in a meaningful way to their science learning,” Stelljes said during the visit.
Building as teacher
The tour began indoors, where students sat at desks while Pruitt stood beside a screen showing a presentation on Winchester’s all-electric, net-zero school. From there, he pointed students toward the parts of the building they might otherwise pass each day without noticing.
In one room, he asked them to look up at the ceiling cassettes that move warm and cool air. In a larger cafeteria space, he asked why there were more air outlets than in a classroom. The answer, he told them, was scale: a bigger room has more air to heat and cool.
He moved from air to light, asking students if they knew what LED stood for. Light-emitting diodes, he explained, can brighten a room while using a small amount of electricity.
Then he pointed to the window shades. Sunlight can pass through glass, hit a dark floor and become heat, he told students. The shades were not just decorations; they helped control how much heat entered the building.
Pruitt used the same idea to explain carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, saying it lets light through but makes it harder for heat to escape.
Outside, he made the lesson physical.
Standing under the panels, Pruitt told students the shade felt cooler because the solar array was catching energy that would otherwise hit the ground or their bodies as heat. Solar panels, he said, intercept that energy and turn it into electricity.
That electricity, he told them, can power lights, heating, cooling, computers and the devices they use every day.
The students’ small solar circuits put the same idea in miniature. Stelljes’ email after the visit described students using the outdoor classroom space to build model circuits with solar panels and test how solar energy can power a motor and propeller.
Pruitt also used the tour to widen the students’ view beyond the building. He told them most buildings in town are still heated by burning fossil fuels, but Winchester’s goal is to move toward all-electric buildings powered by renewable electricity.
He asked what happens at night or on dark rainy days if a building relies on solar panels, leading students toward the answer: batteries.
And when he asked what removes carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, students landed on trees.
“Trees are magic machines that take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere,” Pruitt told them, explaining trees use carbon to build wood and leaves.
Town investment
The tour came less than a year after Lynch opened as Winchester’s newest school building. The $94 million Lynch Elementary School welcomed families for a ribbon-cutting ceremony Aug. 25, 2025, replacing a 1961 building that had originally been built as a junior high school.
The new three-story, 104,000-square-foot school includes 27 K-5 classrooms, an expanded preschool, interactive technology, a STEAM room and a media center.
The Massachusetts School Building Authority contributed $25.2 million toward construction, with Winchester voters approving the local share through a debt exclusion override in January 2023.
But town officials have also framed Lynch as an energy project.
Project materials describe the school as Winchester’s first all-electric, net-zero school. Those materials define zero net energy as generating clean renewable energy on site equal to or greater than annual building consumption. Solar panels crown the building and shade parking areas below, making the infrastructure visible even to students who may not yet understand the votes, contracts and financing behind it.
A June 9, 2023 Zapotec Energy feasibility study estimated Lynch’s annual electricity use at 756,462 kWh and modeled a solar package of 480 kW AC and 645 kW DC.
The study projected about 771,000 kWh of annual production, about 2% more than the school’s projected annual electric use. That 2% measures modeled production above projected consumption, equal to roughly 14,500 kWh above the 756,462 kWh base.
Town Meeting approved both a purchase plan and a backup power-purchase agreement option in November 2023. Article 18, authorizing up to $3.5 million for acquisition and installation of solar panels and solar canopies on or near Lynch and the school parking lots, passed 147-4. Article 19, the backup power-purchase agreement option, passed 125-30.
A later town sustainability update said the awarded solar construction contract came in at about $2.2 million, about $1.3 million below the $3.5 million authorization.
The same update said an expected federal incentive of about $600,000 would bring the final solar project cost to about $1.6 million and described Lynch as Winchester’s first net-zero-energy school, first parking-canopy solar project and largest solar project ever built in town.
Wider energy push
The Lynch project also became part of a broader town and state conversation about energy costs and clean power.
Gov. Maura Healey also visited Lynch earlier in 2026 in connection with her energy affordability and clean energy agenda.
Her broader energy affordability legislation sought to increase homegrown energy supplies, avoid unnecessary spending and save customers money.
For the students on Pruitt’s tour, those policy arguments arrived as vents, lights, window shades and spinning propellers.
Stelljes said the point was not only to show students a finished building, but to let them see science working in a place they use every day. Pruitt’s questions turned the school from a backdrop into evidence: Why was the shade cooler? Why did the propeller stop? Why did a cafeteria need more air outlets than a classroom?
By the time students stepped back into the sun with their small solar panels, the answer was no longer abstract. The light hit the panel, the motor caught and the red blades began to move.
Will Dowd is a Massachusetts journalist who covers municipal government and community life for Winchester News. He is also the founder and editor of The Marblehead Independent, a reader-funded digital newsroom.
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