Temporary Classrooms Become Permanent: Efficiency or Eyesore?

Built in the 1930s, Gage Park High School on Chicago’s South Side resonates with history. Many of the aged classrooms include large, well-maintained paintings that have hung for 40 years, painted by local artists in one of the 1960s’ urban renewal plans. The classrooms have old wood floors, dark wood cabinets, and large windows. The hallways are filled with murals painted by students, surrounded by inspirational words from Martin Luther King, Jr., Cesar Chavez, and John F. Kennedy and the artist-students themselves. Recently the school, with the help of a federal grant, added modular classrooms—trailers erected separately from the main school building. One wonders if those prefabricated sheds, in decades to come, will inspire similar loyalty.

Prefab Explosion

School districts around the country now face their highest enrollment numbers ever. The U.S. Department of Education estimates that the school-age population will have increased by one million students between 2000 and 2006. In the 1960s, California educational planners mandated that one-third of all new classrooms be portable to deal with a growing and shifting student population. Faced with overcrowding and fiscal limits, public schools across the country began using portable classrooms in the 1980s. Since then, the use of mobile classrooms nationwide has increased more than 20 percent annually.

Mobile classrooms save schools time and money. Factories build mobiles from set designs and can deliver them to a school within one to three months—a short wait compared to the time needed to construct permanent additions.

With limited funds to design and build schools, the fiscal details of erecting school trailers make them attractive. “Financing costs for modular classrooms are much more efficient” explains John Kennedy, from Tetonka Capital Investments. “A tax-exempt lease or a conditional sales contract, where the lesser is not subject to federal taxes, allows for a much lower interest rate and therefore is an advantage for the financer and the school district.”

Furthermore, school districts can resell the trailers with little capital loss once a more permanent fixture is put into place. But often what was intended as a temporary fix becomes a permanent solution, changing the appearance and daily life of school forever. As a permanent solution, the numbers don’t necessarily add up. Many trailers need replacement within ten years of purchase—by which time most resale value has been lost. And trailers may pose other kinds of costs as well. The National Trust for Historic Preservation warns that trailers impose an aesthetic scar on historic communities, and advocates for new permanent additions instead. Perhaps most seriously, trailers may reduce the quality of the educational environment.

Gage Park: Delinquency On the Rise

Gage Park, with a recent history of student misconduct and gang-related activity and a graduation rate of only 66 percent, has been on probation for over four years. But the school has been trying to remedy its problems full-force. In 2002, Gage Park implemented a small school within a school, called the Freshman Academy. Its purpose was to separate the freshman class from older peers to lower the chances that they would join gangs or otherwise misbehave. With the help of $75,000 from a federal small schools program, five modular classrooms for the Academy were installed next to the main building.

Gage Park’s trailers were intended to be used as permanent structures but have the feel of a temporary building. The walls are made of foam, the ceilings are low, and little natural light enters the classrooms through the small or nonexistent windows. “I have tried to cover every inch of my classroom with posters and artwork to cover up the sterile feeling that comes with being in a mobile classroom,” explains Sara Carroll, an English teacher at Gage Park. “Being separated from the masses can lead to a calmer environment, which is more conducive to learning. However, the mobile units are not always properly equipped to accommodate the modern classroom. They do not come ready with Internet hook-ups or multiple plugs. The classrooms themselves are small.”

No more than ten classes, each seating approximately 30 students, can be conducted in the mobiles, so only half the freshman class of 600 can fit in the trailers at any one time. “The goal was to have the freshman classes separated from the rest of the school,” states Michelle Reynolds, a biology teacher at Gage Park. “What was planned to be a small school outside of the main building has turned into a percentage of freshmen who are separated from the entire school their first year, while the rest of the freshmen are having an entirely different experience.”

Gage Park’s administration is now trying to purchase or lease an abandoned car dealership two blocks away, renovate it, and make it the permanent facility for the Freshman Academy. The modular classrooms would be used for other grades. “Usually a building of this sort would be leased for $7 per square foot,” says McNair Grant, Gage Park’s business manager. “The entire building would have to be renovated to accommodate classrooms, and the entire ventilation system would have to be restructured as well. It would be quite a project, but we would accomplish what we intended by having [all of the freshman in] a truly separate facility.”

Mobile classrooms have exacerbated the discipline problems they were supposed to abate. Since many freshmen only spend part of their day in the mobiles, these students must walk 150 outdoor yards from the main building to the modular buildings. Security officers are assigned to this path, but even so students have more opportunity to leave school and become truant. Lateness to class is now more frequent in the modulars than the main building and is proving a severe impediment to learning. And gang-related and other delinquent behavior has become more common in the mobiles than in the main building. Freshmen constitute less than a third of the high school population; yet incidents with freshmen accounted for 106 of 118 parent conferences regarding discipline issues, 34 of 51 out-of-school suspensions, 63 of 125 in-school suspensions, and 2 of 3 expulsions in the fall term of 2003. The sources of Gage Park’s discipline problems are not entirely certain, but the temporary classrooms do not seem to have done there job.

Modular Classroom U.S.A.

Modular classrooms have become a common sight in America as school districts struggle with the challenges of increased populations and low budgets. At first the structures seem the only solution, and many teachers, parents, and administrators support the additions. But, as at Gage Park High, many of those supporters later decide that temporary school buildings are not as advantageous as more conventionally built classrooms. What may seem like a cost-saving measure initially often turns out to have negative financial and educational repercussions as a product designed for a temporary solution becomes permanent.