Twenty-two-year-old Chartwell School broke ground at Fort Ord on Tuesday on its first permanent home -- a campus designed to break new ground educationally and environmentally.

Chartwell is the only school in Monterey County -- and San Benito and Santa Cruz counties as well -- exclusively serving students with language-based learning difficulties, including dyslexia. And it's now on course to become the most environmentally friendly elementary school in the United States.

The private school now operates on Imperial Street in Monterey.

"Our research showed us that a building itself can become part of the learning experience," said Executive Director Douglas Atkins. So planners for the new campus kept looking for ways to make that happen. "And the more we did it, the more we got good at it."

One "shining example": The only light bulbs going on in the school's new classrooms will be in the students' heads.

"We can 'daylight' the entire school, classrooms, offices, bathrooms, janitor closets," said Scott Shell, project manager at the San Francisco architectural firm EHDD, which designed the campus.

EHDD also designed the Monterey Bay Aquarium, the Monterey Peninsula College library and the library planned for CSU-Monterey Bay.

Natural lighting is an obvious energy-saver. And studies have shown that it also improves student performance significantly.

Once viewed as a distraction -- "The '70s are generally considered the 'dark ages,'" Shell said -- windows are now seen as providing "visual relief." At the Chartwell campus, students will be able to look outside and see a landscape full of native coastal oaks, presumably a more inspiring view than a windowless wall.

Natural lighting may do as much good for the learning environment as it does for the environment overall.

And one good ecological turn can lead to others. By reducing energy use by 50 percent, natural lighting will save the school lots of money. Planners decided to spend that money to pay for technology -- photovoltaic cells -- that will reduce the school's energy use down to zero, or less.

Photovoltaics use sunlight to generate electricity. And Chartwell will have enough photovoltaics to produce more electricity than it consumes during the summer when "even in Monterey," as Shell said, sunlight is stronger than it is during the winter. The cells will produce so much extra energy during the summer that even though the school will need to buy some electricity during the winter, "In the end, we're a net energy producer."

Besides using no energy, in effect, the new Chartwell campus is designed to use only nontoxic, sustainably produced, recyclable materials. Best of all, whenever possible it will recycle materials itself, including Douglas fir salvaged from buildings torn down on Fort Ord and redwood salvaged from big wine tanks.

The recycled wood is beautiful and high quality, Shell said, but salvaging it is hard work and comes at a high cost. But the project has a research grant from the Environmental Protection Agency to study ways to make salvaging materials easier in the future.

"And the EPA doesn't give out money easily," Atkins said.

The goal is to make the school's buildings easy to take apart. Besides making salvaging less expensive in the long run, that should make repairs cost less in the short run.

Chartwell has 101 students in first through eighth grade. When Phase 1 of its building project is finished next July, it will increase its enrollment to 120, including some younger children. That part of the project will cost $13 million -- for everything from buying 29 acres of land to constructing new classrooms and a large, multi-use/outreach building.

The school has raised $11 million and taken out a $2 million loan. Fundraising continues to pay off that loan and continue with Phase II, which will allow enrollment to rise to 160 students, possibly including high schoolers.

Throughout its history, Chartwell has tried to research new teaching methods, demonstrate them in its own classrooms and then share them with the broader community, Shell said. "Now we want to do the same thing with the architecture."