Connecticut's prep schools, more formally known as independent secondary schools and often thought of as bastions of tradition, are shedding their coat-and-tie image in favor of something more in keeping with the 21st century: environmental leadership.

•As reported recently in The Courant by Steve Grant, the Hotchkiss School has just opened a biomass plant that heats every building on the Lakeville campus using a renewable resource: wood chips. Locally harvested, the chips replace the oil used for decades to make steam for classrooms and dormitories. It's part of a move to have the entire campus carbon-neutral in eight years.

•In Wallingford, Choate Rosemary Hall has just opened the $20 million Kohler Environmental Center, a combination residence-classroom for 14 Choate students and two faculty that's the first of its kind in an American high school. Power for the LEED-platinum-certified building, where environmental science is the academic focus, is provided by 1,000 solar panels.

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•Other schools are not far behind. At Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, where dorms compete to see which can use the least energy, waste heat from the power plant is used to warm buildings. The roof of Avon Old Farms School's hockey rink is covered with $1.4 million worth of solar panels, providing about three-quarters of the campus's power. Westminster School draws geothermal energy for its Armour Academic Center from 72 500-foot-deep wells on the Simsbury campus.

To be sure, Connecticut's colleges and universities are also environmentally active. At the University of Connecticut, chemistry professor Richard Parnas co-founded a company that manufactures biodiesel fuel out of the acrid brown gunk found in restaurant kitchens' grease traps. All of Yale's shuttle buses run on a combination of biodiesel and ultra-low-sulfur fuels. Quinnipiac University gets all its electricity from renewable sources, including vertical-axis wind turbines on campus.

But perhaps because of their smaller size, the state's prep schools are the new champions of environmental responsibility and sustainability.

No matter what colors their athletic teams wear on the field, the prevailing hue at these schools is green.