Flexible and Functional

Threats of tariffs and the inflation their imposition may cause have injected a substantial dose of uncertainty into the U.S. economy. For schools and universities, construction projects may become more expensive because of higher material costs, labor shortages and schedule delays.

Some districts may put the brakes on construction—the Orange County (Florida) district, which has opened 28 schools in the last decade and has three others under construction, is not planning any other new schools until 2031 as it deals with enrollment declines. But situations vary greatly from region to region of the country, and the need for new and renovated schools is undeniable in areas where population is booming or places where aging campuses need significant upgrades or replacement.

And for the most part, voters have shown a willingness to approve the taxes that will pay for building and renovating schools. Last fall, California voters approved spending $10 billion for facility upgrades at K-12 schools and community colleges, and the Los Angeles school district won approval of a $9 billion bond request. This spring, the Portland (Oregon) district approved a $1.83 billion bond proposal, and dozens of school districts and community colleges throughout Texas won approval of more than $12.6 billion in bonds for capital improvements.

So, schools will continue to be built and renovated. The next question is what kinds of schools will they be?

In the 21^st century

Unlike the schools built hastily in the 1950s and 1960s to provide classrooms for the postwar surge of baby boomers, modern learning spaces are likely to be more accommodating to different teaching methods and the varying learning styles of students. For these schools, flexibility is key. A classroom may have a range of seating choices—workstations for computer work, chairs and tables on wheels so spaces can be easily configured for group or individual activities, beanbag chairs, or floor cushions. Seating choices may spill out into corridors or outdoor classrooms if students desire.

A student-centered approach to curriculum and instruction might be successful even in a more traditionally designed school, but the limitations inherent in the design might hinder its effectiveness. That was the situation in the Winton Woods district in Cincinnati. It had adopted a project-based learning curriculum, in which students learn by actively engaging in real-world projects. But the district’s school facilities were outdated and limited the effectiveness of the curriculum.

The obvious solution? Build new schools. District voters approved a $93.5 million bond package in 2016. Winton Woods opened a K-12 campus in 2021 that consists of two schools—one for grades one to six, and one for grades seven to 12.

“They had been doing project-based learning for several years in very traditional school environments, so building new buildings was a great opportunity to create an environment that would actually support the learning that they are trying to do,” says Jeff Parker, an architect who is director of visioning with SHP in Cincinnati.

The design process included significant input from the students who would be the primary beneficiaries of the new schools.

“Because the kids had been doing project-based learning for so long, the district acknowledged that they were kind of the resident experts at what the building should be,” Parker says. “So, they really walked the walk and gave the students a very strong voice. The beauty of working with the kids is that they are candid and blunt, and they will tell you exactly what they think.”

A learning expedition

In Greensboro, North Carolina, the Guilford County district opened a school earlier this year designed to create a student-centered learning environment. The Peck K-8 Expeditionary Learning School, as the name suggests, embraces the expeditionary learning model, which emphasizes hands-on experiential learning.

Students head out of their classrooms into the community on learning expeditions—Peck is close to downtown Greensboro and its numerous offerings can be tapped as resources—and then return to school with their findings.

“The school is the laboratory,” says David Powell, a senior project manager at SHP. “The kids come back and they iterate with each other; they collaborate and study the material that they've collected, and they learn from it.”

 The school has five learning communities, each of which has a common area and gallery spaces. The school also has a discovery center with traditional and digital media resources, a visual art suite, outdoor art garden, studios for music, fitness, drama, and dance.

“The walls are broken down so that the educational environment can be as big or as small as you need it to be, depending on the type of learning and the type of expedition that is assigned,” Powell says. “The learning environments are able to be cross-pollinated with different classes and different teachers and different kids of different grade levels.”

Where’s the cafeteria?

One of the spaces that won’t be found at either the Winton Woods and Peck schools is the traditional student lunchtime spot—the cafeteria.

“Schools typically dedicate a lot of square footage to cafeteria space, and typically, a cafeteria is only really operating as a cafeteria for maybe 90 minutes of the school day,” says Parker. “We asked the question, ‘Is there a way that we can take all of that square footage and make it more directly beneficial to the learning?’ The way to do that was to break that square footage into pieces and make it more adjacent to the learning spaces.”

In the planning for Winton Woods, students said they wanted to eat where they liked and when they were hungry—not when the clock said it was time. Designers call the concept distributed dining. The school has spaces throughout the building with seating where students can eat together or continue their studies.

“Now they have some choice,” says Charlie Jahnigen, executive vice president at SHP. “It's a little more casual....There's high-top seating, low-top seating, soft seating, hard seating. There might be groupings of eight, there might be pairings of two.”

Student collaboration is emphasized in both expeditionary learning and project-based learning and distributed dining supports that, Parker says.

“Having spaces that support that, a flexible kind of almost Panera sort of space or a Starbucks sort of space, really begins to make sense, ”he says.

Staff buy-in

Whether student-centered school designs deliver on the promise of more effective teaching and learning will ultimately depend less on the building itself and more on the educators responsible for breathing life into the concepts.

“The schools that we design are flexible, and they can be used traditionally,” Powell says. “But I would say that the more that teachers and administrators get passionate about what the spaces do, the better for the students, which is what we’re all after anyway.”