Praise is in order for the Isabella students studying the potential of solar power and for their teacher, Jay LeCroy.

Isabella is one of only two state schools that received a several thousand-dollar grant to fund the project, which included installing five solar panels on top of the elementary building and a device that converts solar energy into usable power.

Students will monitor the equipment to see if it is saving the school.

“We will compare the cost of the panels versus the amount of energy we’re producing and see what kind of savings it will produce,” LeCroy said. “This is science and economics, too.”

Even if the students discover that solar power, at least with our current capacity to harvest it, is not the answer to our world’s energy problems, they will still have learned some valuable lessons.