Tucked away on 228th Street Southeast but not all that far from the commercial buzz of Canyon Park, there’s still a quiet that pervades the naturalistic 2.5-acre campus of Bothell’s Whole Earth Montessori School.

Standing in the school’s garden, flanked by a greenhouse and not far from untouched woods, founder Diane Galante said almost every visitor comments on that quiet.

“It just refreshes you, doesn’t it?” she asks in an all seriousness. “So many of the ills of our society can be traced back to being cut off from nature,” Galante added.

With a refurbished barn as its main building, Palm Creek running through the front of the grounds and the already mentioned garden and woods (referred to as “the nature preserve”), the school almost seems to have grown out of its surroundings. The naturalistic or environmental approach dominates Whole Earth’s classrooms, Galante said, and it certainly was the guiding principle behind construction of the campus’ third building.

Opened with a ribbon cutting Aug. 26, the one-story classroom building is powered partly by a large, 3.2 kW solar panel that juts up into the air from a pole off to the side of the building. Heating and cooling arrives courtesy of a mile of buried geothermal coil.

If all goes as planned, instead of using power from the Snohomish County Public Utility District, Whole Earth will be selling it back to the local utility.

Inside, the new building is bright and airy with huge windows and skylights in each room. Like Whole Earth itself, the idea is to keep students as connected to nature as possible, Galante said. But green technology obviously played a huge role in the construction of the building. Using what Galante called brand new software, a computer station near the front of the building allows students to track how much power the solar panel has produced in total or on any given day. The programming also can tell students the amount of CO2 emissions not produced because of the solar panel.

As of just a few weeks after the panel went to work, that number equaled the emissions from a car being driven 155.6 miles.

Galante said because of the unique nature of the building, as well as the nature of its surroundings, the new building was a project at least five years in the planning. Bothell City Council some time ago passed what Galante calls strict rules about development in what is known as the Fitzgerald subarea, which surrounds the school. Galante said she fully supports those rules, but with them in mind, council was hesitant to sign off on a building permit for Whole Earth’s third structure.

Eventually, acting on the advice of supportive council members, Galante took her plans to the Bothell’s community development department. What followed was lots of environmental reports and studies.

“We finally satisfied the various requirements and we got our permit May 13,” Galante said, adding contractor Inglewood Construction had a crew waiting and ready to go at the school even as she arrived back at the property with the hard-earned paperwork. The new building was completed in 101 days. Galante noted students were finishing up the last school year as the work began, so they got a bit of an education in green building.

For example, they saw workers dig four, 90-foot- long, 6-foot deep trenches, home to the building’s geothermal heating and cooling coil.

“If you think of a big slinky on its side, that’s what the coil looks like,” Galante said.

Though “environmentalist” is probably the best word to describe Galante, it probably doesn’t quite cover her dedication to nature. She said she became deeply concerned with environmental issues after taking environmental-science classes in college, classes that had nothing to do with her degree in psychology. After sending her son to a Montessori school, Galante became enamored with that learning system. Founded by her and her husband in 1986, Whole Earth school is an obvious marriage of what became Diane Galante’s two passions.

“Children learn what they live far more than what we tell them,” Galante said, which is why she wants her students to work and walk through the school’s garden and greenhouse, watch for fish in Palm Creek and look for wildlife in the fenced-off “nature preserve.”

While Diane Galante has retired as director of the school where she also taught for 19 years, Whole Earth is still a family concern, with son Joe Galante taking over as executive director. He undoubtedly inherited his mother’s environmental leanings, stating laughingly that he lives in a green-built home and drives a hybrid car.

Both Galantes admit building Whole Earth’s third building green was not the most economic approach. Joe Galante’s hope is the building’s energy savings and production will pay for the building in about five years.

“The example that it sets is worth the investment,” he said.