Melanie Parma and Larry LePage, architects with Somerville, Inc, and I spoke at the 6th Annual Midwest Facility Masters Conference on November 14. Our presentation, “Discover the Twenty-First Century Learning Environment Within Your Existing Building,” illustrated how an existing school house can be transformed using the important concepts of security, storage, flexibility, and collaboration. Re-conceptualized classrooms, gyms, auditoriums, media/information centers, and pupil services centers in a 1950s building can function fully to support the designs of a 21st century educational center.
According to the 2010 census and the National Center for Education Statistics, there were 99,000 public schools in the United States. The average age was 42 years old. That means that more than half of our schools were constructed before 1968. In order to be more informative, the NCES sorts school buildings by functional age or the date of the last renovation to the main structure of the school house. Using this definition, the average age of America’s schools is 16 years. http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/frss/inc/displaytables_inc.asp
The difficulty for many older school houses is that they have been the subject of multiple renovations or additions. Like a person with organ transplants and/or synthetic joint replacements who says my kidneys are three years old, my right hip is eight years old, my knees are ten years old and the lenses in my eyes are six months old, age may seem interpretative but it really is a fixed number. And, by the way, my heart and lungs and brain and the rest of my body are 65 years old; like NCES schools, I am younger than my age.
My local school house is a K-12 school. It is an aggregate of an original gymnasium and three classrooms built in 1938, an elementary school that presents the front face of the school house and built in 1952, a high school addition built in 1976, two elementary wings and a middle school wing built in the 1980s, and a music wing built in 2005. The boilers, electrical and water/plumbing services are of the 1970s vintage. Most local community members are not able to attach a date to their local school but can approximate the most recent additions. Their perception is that the school is in good condition. Of course, their perspective derives from their experience as students in the school or as parents of children in the school; an historical perspective. Ms. Parma, Mr. LePage and I addressed age of a school from the perspective of future utility.
Security and access to the school currently is a non-negotiable issue for school architecture. The tragedy of Sandy Hook Elementary is indelible and no school board wants to become a double victim of school violence; violent injury to children and/or school personnel, and, a perceived failure to take post-Sandy Hook security precautions. Most schools have weighed their vulnerability to a violent event and taken action to secure school doorways. Hardened vestibules and audio-visual surveillance are now the norm at most school buildings.
A 21st security system is physical and attitudinal. Parents bringing a forgotten lunch or picking up a child for a medical appointment or by a local banker coming to talk with high school business education students need reasonable access to the school house while the unknown and unanticipated visitor must be screened. Security being security, access for the first group above is shaping up to be a little different from access for the latter group. These concerns require physical changes to the school house and a public relations campaign to explain how reasonable and needed access by non-school folks can be facilitated.
A 21st security system also is infrastructural. Safety procedures extend to food, water and air safety and protective systems. New procedures also extend to the school’s Internet and Wifi systems. From the vantage point of school safety, the entry and exit of every person, every supply, and every service becomes a new concern. In-school and community discussion of these concerns is the beginning point of institutionalized change. Interestingly, a concern need not become a dollar sign when attitude and information can change behavior.
In every discussion, in-school storage is one of the most common needs of all staff members from teacher to administrator to custodian to food service to bus drivers. No one has enough storage. We often perceive that a 21st century education will utilize digital information and should reduce the volume of books and paper supplies. While this is partially true, the emphasis of reform education on real life problem solving has made learning “stuff rich.” Real life problems require access to real life things and when complex problems are contemplated the quantity of stuff multiplies. Additionally, mobility has moved school supplies from the classroom student desk and shelf to the student back pack. Traditional hallway lockers and under-the-chair book bins are too small. Learning centers are organized on carts as are classroom laptops. Storage areas have begun to look like garages for classroom carts, some of which are needed daily and others are needed for instruction in October only. Conceptually, storage can go horizontal or vertical, on-site and off-site, real or virtual. Planners for a 21st century learning environment will exploit all of these opti0ns to assure that a 20th century classroom functions successfully in this century.
The need and accountability for spatial flexibility is heightened in 21st century school houses. All school departments are called upon to increase productivity while holding or diminishing operational costs. Multiple purpose rooms in a school have become physical “gold.” Whereas, in the early 1950s the construction of a school auditorium or a cafeteria or a rehearsal room may have received easy approval, school rooms or spaces that are used only a fraction of the school day are not acceptable today. Rooms that can double as lunch rooms and community rooms and study halls are needed. Renovations that install partitions and interchangeable seating and variable lighting are very good financial investments.
Flexible usage necessitates flexible structure and infrastructure. 21st learning uses an increasing number of electrical devices. These need electrical power. Power either is made pervasive through extended wiring service or portable with available battery exchanges. 21st learning requires grouping and regrouping of students and teachers. Large group spaces. Small group spaces. Conference rooms. Individual work spaces. All spaces must have access to power and computer servers. Also, 21st century learning is messy. Students engaged in complex and complicated problems need space for spreading out, organizing, analyzing, assembling and presenting their conclusions. Walls with whiteboards, conference table tops that can withstand tape and markers, and floors that can withstand debris and messiness are needed. Attitudinally flexible maintenance and custodial staff are essential now more than ever before.
The last 21st century learning environmental issue we addressed, collaborative processes, is almost anti-facility. In the hypothetical, collaborative learning requires near-spontaneous and simultaneous access of learner to learner, learner to teacher/mentor, and learner to learning information or material. In the hypothetical, a student with a laptop or tablet and cell phone could access any other student or teacher or community resource or higher education or real-world resource and collaboratively to engage in their needed learning experiences.
In real time, collaborative processes optimize a student’s access to teachers, mentors, other students and learning resources in or near to the physical environment of the school. For the facility master, the learning environment begins to resemble an open spaces center with minimized walls and barriers between students and teachers who are organized in subject-specific classes. For example, students in a social studies class examining the politics of global warming could have reasonable physical access to a science class investigating changing weather patterns and a math class learning about statistical models. Collaborative learning is optimized when students in these three disciplines can easily share instruction and study and conclusions. And, teachers of one discipline can engage students in another discipline whose learning needs at that moment require more than one teacher. Not hypothetically, fixed walls and corridors are barriers to optimal collaboration.
Additionally, collaborative learning environments may encompass aspects of security, storage and flexibility. Taken to an extreme, collaborative learning environments also may make the school house obsolete as learning in this context can take place almost anywhere anytime.
The NCES definition of the functional age of a school may require rethinking. The new definition must be in the context of a 21st century learning environment. Using this definition, it is probable that schools renovated even sixteen years ago now face outdated operability. It is probable that only 32 percent of all schools, those with original construction of less than five years present a 21st century learning environment. With clear insights into the differences between 20th and 21st century learning needs, older school houses can be made young again.