Newton has been in the midst of a building boom for a couple of years now—renovating and replacing public facilities that have outlived their usefulness or fallen into disrepair—and that reconstruction renaissance is looking pretty green.

The city is using every eco-friendly tool and material at its disposal as it builds itself into the 21^st century.

And at two schools, Mayor Ruthanne Fuller mentioned in her Friday email to the community, that involves heating and cooling from the ground.

“At Countryside and Franklin Elementary Schools, we are for the first time utilizing super-efficient ground source heat pumps to provide the heating, cooling, and domestic hot water (also known as geothermal heating and air conditioning),” Fuller wrote.

The city will drill 72 wells at Countryside and 40 wells at Franklin (500 and 700 feet deep, respectively), and the wells will draw heat and cool air from underground to moderate temperatures inside the buildings.

“This approach is highly efficient, low-emission, and significantly reduces reliance on fossil fuels,” Fuller continued.

The city has prioritized reducing carbon emissions in buildings, and last year the City Council passed an ordinance mandating energy use reporting and emissions reductions—a BERDO—for buildings over a certain size.

With public building construction, the city is already ahead of that. The Countryside School, Franklin Elementary School, the Cooper Center for Active Living and the Horace Mann extension project are all set to run on electric heat.

In fact, the Cooper Center project won second place in the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center Embodied Carbon Reduction Challenge and a $30,000 prize for innovative use of wood in its construction.