From Fall 2000 Sharing the Light Newsletter

The unique Alternative Energy Center, built back in 1980, was showing signs of its age and it would take plenty of money to fix it, lamented science teacher Mark Wiley to former teacher and Science Department Chair Dale (Dusty) Miller in a chance encounter.

Not long afterward, Dusty mentioned the situation to his good friend Sandy Bristol ’77 and in no time the three of them, Dusty, Sandy and Mark, the coordinator of the Alternative Energy Center, launched a successful fund-raising campaign that astonished even them.

Dusty, who conceived and built the center in 1980, fervently believed then in the importance of showing students how technologies such as solar and wind power, aquiculture and organic gardening can contribute to the health of the planet. Hundreds of students during the six years before Dusty’s retirement in 1986, and the dozen or so years under Mark Wiley’s guidance have taken to heart those lessons learned in the narrow cinder block building flanked by a wind mill and the horse barn at the south end of campus.

Dusty is just as passionate about the Alternative Energy Center now. He is particularly alarmed about the use of non-renewable fossil fuels and what that dependence may do to the stability of world peace. He feels it is even more important that George School remain in the vanguard of alternate energy technology. And he believes that he isn’t alone in feeling this way.

So he wrote a compelling letter to 250 people who might be interested in helping. Most of them were students whom Dusty taught or students who worked with him on Saturday mornings, both those who joined him willingly because they loved the work of draining the pond, planting trees and building things, and those who joined obediently, to make amends for academic or social transgressions.

While Dusty wrote the letters, Mark drafted proposals for foundations, and Sandy went to the Bristol Fund with one of the proposals, requesting a $50,000 grant from this small family foundation. While Sandy was able to convince his relatives to give the grant, they gave it with an initially confounding condition. “I told them, ‘you gotta be kidding me,’ when they said that they would give the $50,000 if other donors would match it in three months time. Who could do that?”

Well, Dusty, Mark, and Sandy could do it, with a lot of help from loyal friends. “To me, that’s a lot of moolah to raise in three months,” wrote Dusty in the April 2000 letter which announced the outcome. Ninety-five donors gave over $60,000, more than matching the $50,000, 90-day challenge.

In addition to providing the solar panels which will be used to generate electricity, the funds will enable the school to renovate the interior, purchase a new weather station, sophisticated technology for monitoring and research, and establish an endowment for the preservation of the building.