Barn Raisings for Schools of the Future
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A growing awareness of the role of the physical environment in teaching and learning requires that school planners stay abreast of current research. Dr. Jeffery Lackney maintains a Web site devoted to disseminating findings to other researchers and practitioners alike. |
Morgan Jones: Speaking before the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science two years ago, you addressed the correlation between school buildings and learning. You told them air quality, sound levels, lighting, and class sizes can all impact student performance. Have these issues been addressed by any subsequent legislation?
Jeffery Lackney: The short answer is legislation was introduced but so far nothing has passed. The story, as far as I’m concerned, is that there’s a lot of voluntary efforts underway and there’s assistance from various federal agencies.
The congressional briefing you’re referring to was organized by the Environmental and Energy Study Institute (EESI). I was working with the Sustainable Buildings Industry Council (SBIC). The EESI and SBIC are both policy-oriented institutions located in Washington, D.C., and their interest was in furthering energy efficient buildings. They wanted to develop a high performance school program with the U.S. Department of Education that was higher than the levels prescribed in the latest International Energy Conservation Codes, which will supercede many existing codes. It was pushing the envelope, but the legislation didn’t pass. But SBIC has had an opportunity to work with Department of Energy, the Department of Education, EPA, and a number of school organizations around the country. They’ve campaigned and developed workshops, and developed a resource guide, High Performance School Buildings. California and a few other states have taken an interest in it.
We’ve continued to push ahead even though legislation has failed. The National Education Association’s Health Information Network worked with the EPA to develop The Indoor Air Quality Tools for Schools Action Kit. They were trying to create something that superintendents could adopt as part of their management plan. The NEA initiated it and the EPA followed through to create free programs for districts and has developed guidance documents. They now develop programs specifically for states such as California, Washington, and Maryland. New York and Massachusetts now have what they call the Healthy Schools Network. The Tools for Schools kit has been modified by many states.
This year, more than $1.6 billion has been set aside to hire and recruit new teachers to accommodate class size-reduction programs. We know that class size is an important variable and intersects with some physical barriers, but space can become a problematic issue. California pushed a state-wide class reduction initiative and had to bring in a lot of trailers. They may be state-of-the-art trailers, but they’re not the best learning environment. It’s an important lesson. For us to think that all we have to do is reduce class size to win the game, it’s not going to work.
MJ: Your research covers not only design, but also the full life-cycle of buildings. What would you like to see more of in facility maintenance programs?
JL: Two advocacy pieces in terms of maintenance: one is to infuse responsibility to the entire learning community, not just the custodian. Do a barn-raising exercise each year, for a new playground or paint the auditorium or build a storage shed for the ball field. I’m doing a case study at Memorial High School in Madison, Wisconsin, where the kids wanted to be involved in the construction of the neighborhood centers of this re-structured school. The unions said, no, that’s our job and you’re taking food off our table. But now, the students are in the building, they’ve got a decoration committee, and they want to paint the walls of their neighborhood centers within the school. The superintendent had to make a deal with the unions to allow them to let the kids paint the walls. Now, the shop teacher will help students build things around the school.
I’ve also learned there’s a shift from thinking about the janitor with the mop in the basement and the facility director out of touch at the main office. The facility management profession was born in 1980 in the private sector with corporate America. You might be familiar with the International Facility Management Association (IFMA). Facility managers went from being custodians and bean counters to being engineers, then to business management professionals. They said, let’s take the facility management function of a building and let’s create a strategic asset out of it.
The physical environment can have a impact. We need to take facility maintenance out of the boiler room and into the school boards. We need to take it to department meetings and put facility issues alongside educational issues and find ways to integrate facility planning and management. My dissertation research looked at some schools in Baltimore and I recognized that when things weren’t working, there was nobody – no educator, no administrator, nobody in the facilities department – who could deal with the question of rearranging the space to make it work better for learning. Educators aren’t interior designers. The facility management people aren’t either.
Now there is more teaming and we have professionals working in groups. We’ve got companies such as Herman Miller and Steelcase developing furniture for learning environments. They’ve studied trends in education about group learning and self-directed work stations, most notably the Zoo School for Environmental Studies in Apple Valley, Minnesota. Herman Miller and others have said, why don’t we create not just work environments, but learning environments? Let’s take a look at how students learn in groups and cooperative learning and how we can create learning systems that are integrated with technology and that can be as flexible as workplace environments, where you can move things around. They’re recognizing that there are many different learning styles, and that precipitates the need for a variety of learning settings, and that these are things that need to be adaptable within a classroom.
Right now, what you see in a classroom is basically the same furniture we’ve used for the last 150 years. Enter Herman Miller or Steelcase, and they’re going to add another level of design. They can think about the details of how students work and learn in groups. There’s a lot of potential there for tailoring learning environments specifically to new ways of learning and teaching which are going on right now.
It’s a market that’s being created from a vacuum in school facility management. It could be an interior function in school management, but isn’t. I think these furniture companies are on to something. Now, whether they can do it and be cost effective for public schools is another story. But we’ve seen a lot of workplace design for computers for a long time – such as the radial and different ways of arranging work stations – and this has worked its way into schools. I think going the extra step and designing for new learning and new instructional methods of technologies is what’s unique about what they’re doing.
School Construction News looks at the planning, design, and construction of school building, but because you’re construction-oriented, you’re also thinking about occupancy and maintenance, which is fantastic. You’re sort of in between the two ends of the spectrum, that is, between the early planning and visioning and the long-term occupancy and use of buildings. And it’s the long-term use of buildings that we haven’t paid enough attention to. Maintenance basically is limited in terms of the way we think about it conceptually. The Herman Millers of the world are thinking about it more broadly and there’s an opening for them to do that.
MJ: What other trends do you see in facility maintenance?
JL: I developed a course called “Effective Facility Management School Buildings.” The core trend I found while developing this course was that telecommunications systems, educational technologies, and building technologies are all integrating and informing one another. Telecommunications is the new kid on the block and it’s allowing maintenance people to better know their buildings at a distance. One maintenance supervisor can access all the data on all his school buildings from the Internet. He can manage it from his home or on his PDA or wherever he is. Connecting databases with real-time monitoring of systems-by literally putting monitors on all your equipment-allows you to see how every piece of equipment is performing.
Also, going back to what I was saying about barn-raising, facility maintenance is integrating itself with educational technology as well. For example, Madison Gas & Electric will put a solar panel on the side of Memorial High School and it’s hooked into their Internet site and the science teacher uses it to teach the process of generating energy. The idea is that you can start to use the building itself in very sophisticated ways in connection with educational technologies. To do that, you’ve got to have someone who thinks way beyond just fixing a light bulb.
Facility maintenance people are trying to get up and running on a lot of these things. There’s a Web site I’ll promote called SchoolDude.com, where, using the Internet, they’ve developed database tools to help facility managers of school buildings get a better handle on where they are. It helps them develop reports so they can report how well a school’s being maintained and sell their function and the importance of facility maintenance to their school boards. Everybody has recognized that we need to sell the facility maintenance function, just like the facility management function, as a strategic asset as opposed to something we’ve got to spend money on. That’s the paradigm shift.