Need for Planning Activities
"Billions
of dollars
are being spent each year to retrofit, renovate, and build schools
in America, and yet these 'new' designs are often based on outmoded
concepts, ignore
special ecological principles and fail to include substantive
client input. All stakeholders, from
students to community members, must be involved in the planning
and design of learning environments according to Taylor, 2000.
Planners and architects should be aware that school
maintenance
begins while the school is in the planning and design phases.
Hence, personnel representing theses vital areas should be involved
in the planning and design of the school.
In the design phase, it may be the maintenance personnel
who can have the greatest impact upon future maintenance costs
in a school.
This
point of view
serves as a basis for the driving force behind what we shall identify
as 'educational facilities planning' in this chapter.
Programming, a necessary aspect of the process, has too
frequently depended on planning based on predetermined square
footage needs built into the most frequently government sanctioned,
educational specifications or even the "cookie cutter school"
AKA prototype schools.
We
advocate the process
of "planning to programming" of educational facilities
including significant contributions from students, the community,
educational professionals, and professionals in the field of planning
and design. Furthermore, it is strongly
recommended that these community and school representatives be
involved throughout the entire process, not just in the beginning
as noted in Figure 3.1. Given a sound
collaborative process, the results will have a better chance of
serving the community's educational and social needs, whether
the final product is intended to be a grade school, community
library, vocational center, or college. Participatory
planning involves collectively identifying values about learning
environments, developing a mission corresponding to the community's
values for learning environments, the construction of surprise-free
scenario statements about the school environment founded on the
values and beliefs, mission, and environmental scans; and the
formulation of a vision of the ideal school environment (See Chapter
17 for a practical exercise employing these concepts).
What
triggers the need
for school facilities planning?
Any one of the following items can awaken the need for
capital planning for a new school or remodeling an existing structure:
Student population increases (increased density), old or dilapidated
buildings, fire, population shifts (the current school is located
in a blighted area or no longer has a sustainable enrollment),
educational program changes, and natural disasters.
The most likely occurrence to activate the need for
any new school building is increased student population.
It is unlikely
that
a capital project happens overnight, unless there is a fire or
natural disaster. Large scale planning
is usually an ongoing process in larger school systems and more
periodic in smaller school systems. Regardless
of school system size, school facilities planning entails regularly
scheduled feasibility studies of the school environments.
Thorough checks should take place to ensure that the school
program is being facilitated, not constrained, by the physical
environment. If the program
and school facilities are not in harmony, modifications to existing
structures need to be made or new physical environments should
be created to accommodate program changes.
There are several ways to assess structures to determine
adequacy.
Phases
in Planning for Educational Learning Environments
The
chief guiding principle is that the learning environment should
result from an interactive process involving all stakeholders.
Design is always evolving as new research findings reveal flaws
in various former designs and flaws in former assumptions and
beliefs about the complicated processes of learning.
In 2000 the United States Department of
Education
released a document entitled Schools as Centers of Community:
A Citizens' Guide for Planning and Design. A
revision of this document was published in 2003 (Bingler,
Quinn, & Sullivan, 2003). According to these documents,
effective learning environments are designed to
Enhance
teaching and learning and
accommodate
the needs of all learners
Serve as
centers
of the community
Result from
a planning/design process involving all stakeholders
Provide for
health, safety, and security
Make effective
use of all resources
Allow
for flexibility and adaptability to changing needs
These
six national design principles produced
by the U. S. Department of Education may be used to guide planning and
design activities.
The following
section contains the
procedures that lead to school design.
There are six planning phases preceding the formal programming
activity.
Phase I-
Determine the Principles and Values
Surrounding Learning Environments
Phase II -
Develop
a
Purpose for the Physical Learning Environment
Phase
III - Examine the Context
Phase IV - Specify
What is Realistic, Given the Context, Mission, Values and Beliefs
Phase
V - Envision
Alternative School Environments That Capture Data-based
Scenarios
Phase VI - Select the Best
Alternative
Phase VIII
Complete Final Design and Pre-construction
Activities
Assuming
the
planning and design team has identified the space relationships,
it is time for a professional architect to translate the planning,
programming, and sketches into a schematic design of the desired
physical environment.
Phases IX and X Construct
and Occupy the Facility
Beginning
Milestones
in Planning a Capital Project
Phase I
To make the process more
realistic, we
must consider that planning takes place in the context of state
and local policy constraints, and the phases and stages may overlap
from one project to another and among school systems.
The major and most frequently followed generic activities
or milestones (not necessarily listed chronologically) of planning
a capital project in the United States are outlined below.
A- Begin the Planning
Process. This
initial activity has been termed "planning to plan" in the traditional
planning literature. In our method of planning and designing
schools, it represents the education phase (informing stakeholders
about how school design influences student behavior, attitudes, and
learning); therefore the focus is on Pre-Design
and Planning Activities. This is
followed by the organizational
phase in the long-range planning
process, including a time line and assignment of responsibility
and authority.
B- Forecast Student Enrollment.
Forecast
the school district's student population for at least 15 years to
determine trends in
growth, decline, and location within the district.
Enrollment forecasting
requires a thorough demographic analysis.
This phase includes a comparison of square footage needs
per student with existing square footage of spaces for learning.
Milestone B certainly helps to document the "need" for
educational learning environments.
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