Focused Strategic Planning (Copyright)

C. Kenneth Tanner 2007

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. 
 

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

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 VII- Program 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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