SchoolsApr07Inside

Decisions on where schools are built and how much land they occupy are gradually beginning to reflect New Urbanism’s belief in the importance of physically fitting the schools into their communities.
Since 2003, three states — Rhode Island, Maine, and South Carolina — have eliminated minimum acreage requirements for new schools. The organization that had long been the chief proponent of acreage standards — the Council of Educational Facility Planners International, or CEFPI — has backed away from such standards. (see table of state minimum acreage requirements, below).
Some of the credit for this progress belongs to the Smart Growth Program of the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), which provided a study grant that led CEFPI to remove acreage guidelines from the 2004 edition of its influential Guide for Planning Educational Facilities. The National Trust for Historic Preservation has also played a role, drawing attention to school siting in its booklet “Why Johnny Can’t Walk to School,” first published in 2000.
In South Carolina, Governor Mark Sanford, a Republican, persuaded the legislature to end acreage requirements, which he argued were making students too dependent on vehicular transportation and less apt to walk to school. “Creating more neighborhood schools … makes sense from a learning standpoint, an economic standpoint, and it makes sense if you want to have schools that are part of a community’s fabric as opposed to part of its sprawl,” Sanford has said.
EPA hopes this spring to issue a call for proposals for a state-by-state approach to educating key decisionmakers about school siting standards. The initiative is seen as essential because many school systems continue building on oversized parcels, in locations that are hard to reach on foot — worsening the epidemic of childhood obesity and straining the finances of communities. Arkansas and Wyoming are two states that adopted acreage standards in the past few years after previously leaving such decisions to local people. In all, approximately 27 states have guidelines or standards saying how much land a school should have, EPA policy analyst Tim Torma says.
Usually the standards are based on the grade levels served — high schools require more land than elementary schools — and on the school’s enrollment. In 2004, the Arkansas Department of Education recommended the following minimum site sizes:
• Elementary school: 10 acres plus 1 acre per 100 students.
• Middle school: 20 acres plus 1 acre per 100 students.
• High school: 35 acres plus 1 acre per 100 students.
Although Arkansas’s policy statement acknowledged that site size deviations “may be required because of extenuating circumstances,” it also offered this advice: “Where possible, larger site sizes or additional acreage should be strongly considered to allow adequate land for development, storm water detention, building expansion, topography features, subsurface sanitary sewage systems, etc.”

NOT-SO-SWEET HOME ALABAMA
School siting was a main focus of a two-day conference on school design conducted by the Seaside Institute Feb. 19-20 in Montgomery, Alabama, a state where new urbanists have found acreage standards troublesome. Rip Weaver, town landscape architect for Mt Laurel, a traditional neighborhood development 22 miles south of Birmingham, told New Urban News that it’s common in Alabama for 11 acres to be required for an elementary school, 17 acres for a middle school, and 35 acres for a high school.
In 1998 Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company laid out Mt Laurel with a public elementary school as a key component of the town center. “It terminated the vista,” Weaver says. “We wanted a school that works much like the Rachel Carson School at Kentlands” in Gaithersburg, Maryland. But when EBSCO Development Company, developer of the mountainous 550-acre community, learned that the state would require 10.6 acres for the 650-student school, it became impossible to place it in the mixed-use center. Instead, the school was positioned some distance away — though on axis, and close enough that children and parents can walk back and forth between the school and the now-functioning center.
An approximately 300-student Montessori school, which, as a private institution, is exempt from acreage standards, ultimately was built where the public school had been intended to stand. “Our [public] school here has a gross amount of acreage, which lends itself to a nasty pattern on the ground,” Weaver says.
At the conference in Montgomery, Perry Taylor, chief architect in the Alabama Department of Education and the single most important voice in such matters in his state, said, “We’re open to change.” But he undercut the promise of flexibility by saying, “I think we would have to move very carefully before we say there are no acreage requirements. I’m not sure how we get there.”
Weaver believes one reason for the insistence on large sites is the tendency of schools in fast-growing areas to expand, often by adding “portable classrooms” — essentially trailers — as the enrollment rises. Mt Laurel Elementary, a picturesque stone and stucco facility that opened in 2004, already has portable classrooms, but they’re expected to be removed within months.
Geoffrey Anderson, head of the smart growth program at EPA, said the time has come to “create a common agenda among town planners, city officials, educators, school board members, parents, and school planners,” recognizing that parents and communities would benefit from better-situated schools — and that states would benefit from lower overall costs of schools, transportation, and energy. “The first step,” he said, “would be getting different people involved in the decisions,” such as physicians, who can talk about the health benefits of small schools that people can walk to.
Given the prevalence of site standards at the state level, “there is a lot to do,” acknowledged John Norquist, CEO of the Congress for New Urbanism. “But,” Norquist added, “there is no defense (intellectual or otherwise) being mounted for minimum acreage. So eventually we’ll win … The issue needs to be presented as an easy way to update school regulations by just eliminating minimums. It will spread just like Don Shoup’s parking ideas are being picked up.”
Approximately 70 public officials, educators, architects, developers, and others from several states participated in the conference, held at Jones Law School of Faulkner University, where Chad Emerson, an expert on legal aspects of New Urbanism, is a professor. Emerson said “most of what remains are procedural challenges” that revolve around “getting already swamped legislators to make the changes during their legislative session.”

ALTERNATIVES TO PUBLIC SCHOOLS
Since public school bureaucracies often resist change, speakers such as Norquist and representatives of the Seaside Neighborhood School in Florida suggested pursuing alternatives to typical public schools. Norquist favors voucher programs, which allow parents to choose where their children are schooled. “The kids would be better off if the customer and the provider had to deal with each other,” said Norquist, predicting that school vouchers would encourage more families to live in cities. Charter schools, like the one at Seaside, are also a step in the right direction because they tend to be small and to fit naturally into their communities, some participants said.
School consolidation, a force in American life for three-quarters of a century, has exacerbated the tendency toward building schools at outlying locations and on sites that offer few pedestrian connections to homes and community services. From 1930 to 2002, the number of students in the US rose to 53 million from 28 million while the number of schools plummeted to 91,000 from 262,000, Anderson said.
“Half of secondary schools enroll over 1,000 students,” Anderson said, noting that big schools typically rely on fleets of school buses. Unfortunately, “school construction money and transportation money are from different pots, controlled by different people,” which virtually eliminates the financial incentive for building the schools where students can walk to them, he said.

PROTOTYPES VERSUS CUSTOM DESIGNS
Bill Gietema, CEO of Arcadia Realty in Dallas, argued for producing prototype schools that can fit into walkable settings. (See Walker Creek elementary school in North Richland Hills, Texas, on page 8.) Many school districts prefer a design that can be reproduced a number of times, reducing architectural costs, he pointed out. However, Gietema’s admonition — “Get the right prototypes” — received a frosty reception from conferees such as David Tomes, a developer in Prospect, Kentucky, who insisted that a single design would not fit multiple locations well, especially in communities where the topography varies.
Roy Strickland, a University of Michigan architecture professor who has helped cities such as Paterson and Union City, New Jersey, devise ways of improving education, argued that many school programs would function more effectively in nontraditional structures such as factories, museums, convents, armories, hotels, former department stores, and downtown shopping malls. Often these out-of-the-ordinary facilities energize the students, leading them to take more initiative in their education. School programs scattered throughout a community can help activate less-than-thriving business districts; the students and teachers add to the customer base and to community life.
Although teen-agers — especially those from low-income families — are often seen as disruptive when they’re on the streets, Strickland argued that adolescents who are on their way to a park or to some other facility they enjoy “are a civilizing influence.” He encouraged administrators to think about placing school programs in multi-story urban buildings, where housing for teachers or for the elderly might occupy the upper floors. Strickland’s “City of Learning” approach is credited with having shaped the planning and delivery of more than $1 billion in school and community development projects nationwide.
David Slyman Jr., developer of the Village of Providence, a new urbanist mixed-use development in Huntsville, Alabama, said a well-designed, high-performing new school can help attract homebuyers to a development, as happened in his project, situated in a part of Huntsville that previously lacked a good reputation for education.