Safety and Security in School Planning
While the central function of a school facility is to support the educational process, no one would argue the primary pre-condition: that a school provides a reasonably safe and secure environment for its users.
In recent years, electronic surveillance and building monitoring technologies have greatly enhanced the prospect for school safety and security. As always, an alert, tuned-in administration and conscientious, ongoing oversight of a school’s environment is essential to the well-being of its population.
Physical planning and the design of a school facility can greatly affect safety and security, for good or bad. At every level of development, from site planning to detailed architectural design, choices arise that will have a profound impact on human safety and overall security.
Although many safety-and security-related planning considerations are interrelated, they can be grouped into three main categories:
- Building Configuration: The location of functions, relative to each other, influencing movement patterns and the potential “zoning” of the facility.
- Line-of-Sight Considerations: Avoiding visually isolated areas.
- Site Design: Relationship of the building to its site and its environment.
The recently completed Cesar A. Batalla Elementary School in Bridgeport, Conn., is a particularly relevant case study. The new two-story facility of approximately 150,000 square feet, located in a vital but long-blighted area of the city, is intended to be a positive new presence in a challenging, rough neighborhood. Its design, relative to safety and security, was a major concern throughout the planning process. The following project-specific strategies for success are generally applicable to school design.
Overall Building Configuration
As a school for more than 1,000 pre-K and K-8 students, Batalla Elementary must provide for a wide age and behavioral range. Zoning by floor levels was limited to two stories because of fire code safety concerns and school officials’ preference to reduce stair travel and supervision difficulties frequently encountered in higher multistory structures.
The creation of grade-related neighborhoods was achieved through the use of discrete classroom pods, connected to a light-filled corridor. This arrangement permits some mixing of age groups in common areas, but reduces the frequency of happenstance intrusion by widely disparate age groups or individuals. Younger grades are placed closer to the main entry and administrative areas, while older, more distant grade locations are provided with satellite administration centers.
The corridor leads to a main lobby, which also provides direct access to common, large group areas, such as the gymnasium, cafetorium, media center and their support spaces. With this linear organization, the convenient closing of two pairs of doors after regular school hours can limit public use of common spaces, while denying unsupervised access into classroom areas. This measure of security is doubly important, given that common areas of the school are intended to serve as vital community facilities after hours.
Line-of-Sight Considerations
The desire to permit visual scrutiny of areas in and around the new school greatly influenced the overall building layout. For example, the classroom pods described earlier create open-ended courtyards that are readily supervised from the exterior. In fact, although many of the building functions are expressed architecturally, helping to reduce the apparent scale of the facility, blind corners are avoided. During the planning and design process, the building committee stressed the need for the building and grounds to permit a 360-degree perimeter visibility through a combination of street and on-site driveways.
The extensive use of glass walls and doors on hold-open devices helps create a sense of internal transparency and visual connection, and permits direct supervision of some key spaces. For example, administration and security offices flanking the main lobby overlook the front door, the media center, access to common areas, and the path to all classroom areas. Large glass areas also permit monitoring of computer labs off the media center.
Most of the exit stairs in the facility lie “outboard” of the main structure, and all permit visual scrutiny through the extensive use of a glass curtain wall. Since stairs are notoriously difficult to supervise, the glass walls help to psychologically reduce the potential for impulse-based misadventure.
The large, multipurpose recess court is overseen from the cafetorium via a two-story high glass opening. The courtyard lies along a major local traffic route, and is bordered by a metal picket fence, somewhat restricting physical access but permitting visual connection by passers-by, to create what the noted urban planner Oscar Newman first characterized as “defensible space.”
On the east side of the building’s exterior, a strategy has been borrowed from fortress design: the intermediate landing of the central fire stair pokes a triangular glass bay out beyond the main building face, thus permitting a quick and unobstructed view in both directions along the structure’s exterior.
Site Design
The public side of the school is oriented to a nearby major street intersection. This inclusive gesture allows the building to benefit from the security of local activity after hours, makes the main entry more apparent for visitors, and helps shield quieter classroom areas from traffic noise and potentially distracting sidewalk activity. The converse is also a benefit: after-hours activity generated by the new school helps enliven and brighten the surrounding neighborhood in a positive way. In contrast, classroom areas, quiet and low-lighted in the evening, are a good neighbor presence to the adjacent residential areas away from the main intersection.
Well-lit drop-off and parking areas are configured to separate bus and car traffic, and to permit line-of-sight supervision.
As an added benefit, the pod configuration and the placement of on-site vehicular areas permits after-school exiting by students directly from their classroom wing, thus reducing travel time, and eliminating potentially disruptive concentration of students at the main lobby.
Jeffrey A. Sells, AIA, is an architectural designer with Fletcher-Thompson Inc., with more than 25 years of experience and a special emphasis on the design of educational facilities.
The building committee emphasized the need for the buildings and grounds to allow for 360-degree perimeter visibility.