Rebuilding America’s Schools at the Intersection of Education, Architecture, and Community

In 1999, Omaha Public Schools were considering building a new elementary school just west of the Missouri River on the low-income fringe of downtown. They were concerned, however, about Drake Court Apartments, adjacent to the chosen site. The 216-unit historic apartment complex, completed in 1919, was vacant and had become a notorious magnet for illicit activity. Then, NuStyle Development Corporation, an Omaha-based company, heard about the proposed school. They had already considered buying and renovating Drake Court, but had been worried about attracting new tenants.

According to Julie Staveak, a project manager with NuStyle, the possibility of improving the surrounding neighborhood by constructing a school suddenly “made the project sing for us.” Omaha Public Schools and NuStyle soon began working with lending organizations, community groups, and city agencies to create plans for the two sites and secure funding. 

Meanwhile, the school district contacted Rose Children’s Theater, the YMCA, and the Omaha Children’s Museum, all within walking distance of Liberty Elementary, to find ways to integrate their needs with those of the district. When the new school opens in August, these institutions will organize cultural activities in the school, and the school will provide space for the institutions—for example, the overcrowded Children’s Theater will use school space to teach dance classes.

In another corner of the school, the “activity wing,” easily accessible from the street and the parking lot, will invite area residents to use the in-house public library, computer lab, gym, and cafeteria. One World Community Health Center, an Omaha medical provider, will offer walk-in services to anyone needing care, charging them according to their ability to pay. Students will easily be able to receive physicals and immunizations—more than the school nurse alone could provide.

Around the country, cities like Omaha are rethinking the function of schools within communities. Faced with decrepit school buildings and a shortage of land for new construction, many districts have begun to reshape the urban school. They are placing students in smaller facilities that sometimes share instructional and support spaces with other community institutions. They’re forming partnerships with local organizations to provide additional educational, career development, and social service resources to students and neighborhood residents. And they are designing school spaces to promote interdisciplinary, project-based learning and to encourage more student-teacher interaction. Districts like Omaha see these innovations as the foundation of a better school. In the process, they may also be fashioning a stronger, more marketable community. By the time renovations to the infamous Drake Court were completed in May 2003, all 138 apartments had been leased, including 30 at full market-rate rents, an outcome unthinkable a few years ago.

A New Way to Build Schools

Historically, most urban school districts have used a formula to calculate square footage required per student; then, they determine the number of generic, no-frills rooms that are needed, divide it up, and construction begins. Nancy Oberst, Liberty Elementary School’s principal, chose the architecture firm of Zenon, Beringer, Mabrey Partners, Inc. to design the school because they would do things differently—through a collaborative process with the community. According to Oberst, “Some firms were set in a certain mold for the new school. With this firm, as the design process went forward, they showed how sensitive they were to what the community wants.”

The collaboration is evident. After a series of community meetings, school officials and architects decided to design a gymnasium conjoined to a multipurpose room. By removing a partition between the two rooms, a large space with a stage opens up. The combined space will be large enough to hold the school’s students and their parents together for a free breakfast program provided by Campfire U.S.A., a neighborhood-based youth service agency, which will also offer information to parents on support services located within the school and the surrounding area. The architects have also included partitions in classrooms that will let teachers split a room into smaller areas so students may work on group or individual projects. In addition, windows on the interior walls of classrooms will filter natural light into hallways, brightening the building’s interior while establishing a visual connection between spaces.

To prepare for Liberty’s opening, Oberst and her staff have been knocking on doors around the school in an extensive community outreach effort. They want residents to understand how the school can benefit them. Oberst says they’ve made progress, helped by the school’s temporary location one block from the new building. “We’ve already got this huge presence out there. Having 450 kids on the street corner is an unusual thing in this part of town.”

The Market for Innovative School Facilities

Students in underfunded school districts spend their days in overcrowded and crumbling buildings. Transforming these learning environments will require huge federal, state, and local capital expenditures. In 1995, the General Accounting Office reported that American schools needed $112 billion in construction funds, and that would only address deferred maintenance, safety, and accessibility. Once you go beyond basic health and safety issues, the price tag soars: in 2000, a National Education Association report argued that schools required approximately $322 billion to create facilities that would “promote educational success.”

These reports highlight the urgent need to rebuild and renovate public schools. How exactly to “promote educational success” through school facilities, however, remains unclear. For over 30 years, Anne Taylor, a professor at the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture and Planning, has designed schools and researched how the physical environment affects children’s cognitive development. Taylor says that a school’s physical form should create an environment “where kids are anxious to learn and are knocking down the doors to get to school instead of dragging themselves in.”

Many urban school districts have decided that small schools are the key to improving academic performance. Usually 600 students or less, these are places where staff and students can develop and sustain close relationships. Taylor cautions that these schools must be architecturally stimulating, and not simply smaller versions of large facilities. Taylor and other school architects stress diversity in the size and shape of internal spaces, so they are designing schools that include small workspaces, presentation areas, galleries to display student projects, and studios. They are creating flexible configurations that enable multiple classrooms to combine into larger spaces for lectures and performances. And they are strategically placing windows and skylights to brighten rooms and halls with natural light.

School architects in impoverished urban neighborhoods are also beginning to address the needs of the surrounding area within the school. “To combine the community functions with the school is the only way to go,” Taylor says. “Why have separate cultural and community centers? Why not make the school the place in the community?”

Seattle: Community-Based Designs Across the City

In large urban districts, thinking about schools in the community context is easier said than done. Even when innovative architects win a job, school boards often reject community-based design processes and innovative architecture as unnecessary and expensive in the face of tight budgets and short deadlines. According to Julie Eizenberg, a Los Angeles architect who has designed schools around the country, financial and time constraints are obstacles to innovative school architecture. “Even architects who want to make change have difficulty getting that to happen because the system doesn’t want that.” While Taylor conceives of the school architect’s ideal role as a “proactive, aesthetic educator who is offering alternatives,” Eizenberg notes that, all too often, “a symbiosis develops where clients don’t want their architects to push them.”

Since 1995, Seattle residents voted to spend $710 million in property taxes to build or renovate 34 of the city’s school facilities. Soon after, the Seattle School District hired the Heery Corporation, a multinational project management firm, to oversee all design, construction, and renovation.

Ralph Rohwer, who is in charge of Heery’s Seattle operations, says that in an ideal situation, “what you do is plan your buildings, figure out what you want in them, and then go out to the voters and ask for money.” In reality, Heery more often finds itself constrained by preliminary financial plans devised and voted on by the public before the company is hired.

Still, Rohwer reports that some urban clients are beginning to rethink how they build schools. In Seattle, from the beginning, the proposed budget included provisions for School Design Teams. Each school fields a team comprising staff, parents, students, administrators, local organizations, and any interested members of the community. These teams range in size from 15 people for smaller schools to 40 or more for a high school. They represent, according to Rohwer, “the primary voice for the architect to get input for the design process.”

Educational philosophy has driven Seattle’s policy. Seattle’s district has focused on changing the way students learn by shifting their curriculum to project-based programs that are tailored to students’ interests. According to the district’s publication, School Design Process (2002), the Design Teams are encouraged to “move away from the current paradigm, which suggests that all students learn the same things in the same way from the same people… this paradigm no longer serves students, and is no longer an acceptable model for planning educational facilities.”

Cleveland High School in Seattle provides one example. The district is renovating this 77-year-old building into four “academies,” each with its own cluster of classrooms where students will spend two-thirds of their day with the same faculty members. The academies will share a centrally located library, theater, gym, and cafeteria. Each academy contains adaptable space where students can study, meet in small groups, or set up displays of their work. Students can select an academy depending on their interests—health and environment, information technology, global studies, or arts and humanities. Rohwer says that schools like this one allow kids to “feel like they’re in a small environment instead of being one of billions of kids in this huge factory school.”

Paterson, New Jersey: The City as Classroom

In 1996, the New Jersey Supreme Court ruled in Abbott v. Burke that the state must achieve spending parity on school facilities between affluent suburban and cash-strapped urban school districts. Following the court’s decision, the state legislature earmarked $12.3 billion for community schools in poor urban areas. With $740 million in “Abbott funds” coming to Paterson, New Jersey, superintendent Edwin Duroy seized the opportunity to begin dismantling some of Paterson’s overcrowded and dilapidated high schools, replacing them with smaller schools along the academy model.

Patterson currently operates 26 academy schools (23 high schools and 3 middle schools) with enrollments ranging from 13 to 210 students. Creating this new system has not only meant shifting classes to new buildings, but also making the urban environment part of the curricula. Paterson Public Schools (PPS) now brings city resources into the classroom, and students explore the Paterson area, working on projects related to their interests. Academies share resources (including gym classes at the YMCA) and partner with other organizations that, in some cases, help them design curricula. Keeping the students engaged in their work is crucial to teachers and administrators. Vincent Caramico, who administers Paterson’s academy schools, emphatically states that, “The most important thing for us is to make students want to be here.”

At the Garret A. Morgan Academy for Transportation and Technology, high school students focus on civil and mechanical engineering concepts, urban planning, and transportation. For the past four years, a newly renovated historic building, formerly the Rogers Locomotive Plant, has housed the school. In collaboration with The Center for Advanced Infrastructure Transportation at Rutgers University, the school has developed exciting, project-based classes on the local urban environment, each allowing students to improve their skills in multiple subjects. For example, a disaster mitigation project has students look at a scenario where a tractor-trailer jack-knifes on the nearby interstate highway, spilling out highly toxic chemicals. Students build small-scale models of the site in art class, they work with transportation faculty to devise citywide evacuation plans (after traveling along Paterson’s roads), and in English class they create brochures that outline steps for the public to take in the event of the disaster. Other academies are more directly career-oriented: the Pre-Collegiate Teaching Academy was developed in conjunction with Montclair State University; the Health and Related Professions Academy, which has partnered with local hospitals and the University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey (UMDNJ), offers students the opportunity to shadow healthcare professionals working in urban clinics and hospitals.

Paterson schools had considered building these collaborative academies before the Abbott decision, but according to Caramico, “These would have been far-fetched ideas” without the infusion of “Abbott funds.” Initial data indicate reason to be optimistic about the academies’ impact: according to Caramico, the district dropout rate is around ten percent; the dropout rate for the academies is one percent.

The inevitable need to transform school facilities across America offers opportunities to build new urban schools that work more closely with the neighborhoods around them. Through stimulating and functional architecture, project-based learning, and community collaborations, students, parents, and neighborhood residents can all benefit. Those benefits may attract more residents to repopulate moribund neighborhoods, as has happened in Omaha. In many cities, it is the schools that drive away families who are able to leave; perhaps community-based schools can draw them back.