PHILADELPHIA — The American Institute of Architects’ (AIA) Committee on the Environment (COTE) honored three educational buildings as part of the 2016 COTE Top Ten Awards, held last month at the AIA Convention in Philadelphia.
WAKE COUNTY, N.C. — Wake County School Board members approved a $1.98 billion school construction program last week to help meet the Wake County Public School System’s operational needs by 2023.
ELLENSBURG, Wash. — Construction management students at Central Washington University (CWU) are trying to encourage friendship on the playground with their latest project: the buddy bench.
The CWU students built three buddy benches for the nearby Mount Stuart Elementary playground in hopes of eliminating loneliness and fostering friendships at recess. The concept behind the two-person bench is that if a student doesn’t have a friend to play with at recess, they sit on the bench and wait for someone to come sit with them.
DOUGLAS COUNTY, Colo. — To protect its students and staff, the Douglas County School District (DCSD) decided to use firearms as its latest mode of security.
BOISE, Idaho — In an effort to increase campus security, Boise State University has adopted a new safety app. The university has partnered with Rave Mobile Safety, a creator of public safety data and communication software based in Framingham, Mass., to deploy the company’s Rave Guardian Campus Safety App. The nearly 25,000-student university located in Ada County is one of more than 1,200 higher institutions across the country to integrate the safety technology.
SAN MARTIN, Calif. — San Martin/Gwinn Elementary School in San Martin, located in California’s Silicon Valley and part of the Morgan Hill Unified School District, recently installed the nation’s first and only prefabricated classroom to be pre-verified by the Collaborative for High Performance Schools (CHPS). School leaders collaborated with American Modular Systems (AMS) of Manteca, Calif., which installed the school’s first Gen7 CHPS PreFAB classrooms on May 13.
WASHINGTON — Last Friday, a joint letter from the Departments of Education and Justice went to public schools, addressing guidelines to ensure that “transgender students enjoy a supportive and nondiscriminatory school environment,” the Obama administration said. While the letter does not specifically cite enforcement of the law, it was the latest attempt to make it clear that if state schools do not agree to follow the message, they risk losing federal funding.
MILWAUKEE — The University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh celebrated the opening of the university’s newly renovated Clow Social Science Center — home to the College of Nursing and College of Letters and Science — during a dedication ceremony held May 13.
EASTON, Mass. — The Sally Blair Ames Sports Complex at Stonehill College in Easton received a Construction Management Association of America (CMAA) Project Achievement Award in the New Construction category on April 19.
ROCHESTER, Mich. — In April, the Oakland University Board of Trustees approved schematic designs of the new Southern Student Housing Complex project in Rochester. Construction is scheduled to be completed in August 2018, according to The Oakland Press.
