SCHOOL FACILITIES - OVERVIEW, MAINTENANCE AND MODERNIZATION
OF SCHOOLS FACILITY CONSTRUCTION EDUCATIONAL
OVERVIEW
An effective school facility is
responsive to the changing programs of educational delivery, and at a minimum
should provide a physical environment that is comfortable, safe, secure,
accessible, well illuminated, well ventilated, and aesthetically pleasing.
The
school facility consists of not only the physical structure and the variety of
building systems, such as mechanical, plumbing, electrical and power,
telecommunications, security, and fire suppression systems. The facility also
includes furnishings, materials and supplies, equipment and information
technology, as well as various aspects of the building grounds, namely,
athletic fields, playgrounds, areas for outdoor learning, and vehicular access
and parking.
The school facility is much more
than a passive container of the educational process: it is, rather, an integral
component of the conditions of learning. The layout and design of a facility
contributes to the place experience of students, educators, and
community members. Depending on the quality of its design and management, the
facility can contribute to a sense of ownership, safety and security,
personalization and control, privacy as well as sociality, and spaciousness or
crowdedness. When planning, designing, or managing the school facility, these
facets of place experience should, when possible, be taken into consideration.
Constructing
New Facilities
During strategic long-range
educational planning, unmet facility space needs often emerge. The goal of
educational planning is to develop, clarify, or review the educational mission,
vision, philosophy, curriculum, and instructional delivery. Educational
planning may involve a variety of school and community workshops and surveys to
identify and clarify needs and sharpen the vision of the district. Long-range
planning activities, such as demographic studies, financing options, site
acquisitions, and community partnering opportunities are often initiated by the
district administration as a response to the results of educational planning.
An outcome of long-range planning is the development of a comprehensive capital
improvement program to address unmet facility needs.
The district superintendent appoints
a steering committee to oversee the details of the capital improvement program.
The responsibility of the steering committee includes the selection of various
consultants, the review of planning and design options, and the reporting of
recommendations to the school board for a final decision. Depending on the
needs of the district, one of the first tasks of the steering committee is to
retain a variety of consultants. Educational and design consultants, financial
consultants, bond counsels, investment bankers, and public relations
consultants are retained to perform pre-referendum planning activities during
which project scope, budget, financing, legal issues, and schedule are defined.
Once project feasibility is established, a public referendum package is
developed and presented to the taxpaying public through public hearings. Upon
passage of the public referendum, more detailed facility planning of the school
can begin.
An architect is often selected to
assist in facility planning in cooperation with the educational planning
consultant and in-house facility staff. The school board, as the owner, enters
into a contract for services with the chosen architect. The architect, in turn,
negotiates contracts with a variety of consultants, including interior
designers, landscape architects, mechanical, electrical, and civil engineers,
and land surveyors.
The facility planning process at its
best involves an assessment of functional needs in light of the educational
program developed during educational planning. There are several names for this
process: Educators refer to the development of educational specifications,
while architects refer to it as facility programming. Facility planning
includes any or all of the following activities: feasibility studies, district
master planning, site selection, needs assessment, and project cost analysis.
Spatial requirements and relationships between various program elements are established.
The outcome of the facility planning process is a public facility program, or
educational specifications document, that outlines physical space requirements
and adjacencies and special design criteria the school facility must meet.
The design phase of the process,
which includes schematic design, design development, and construction documents
and specifications, can last from six months to one year. Each step in the
design process involves more detailed and specific information about the technical
aspects of the building systems, components, and assemblies. The design process
requires school board decisions and approval, with each phase offering more
detailed descriptions of the scope, budget, and schedule. The products of this
phase include sketches, drawings, models, and technical reports, which are
shared with the school and community through public hearings, workshops, and
other forms of public relations and community involvement. Community
participation during the earliest stages of the design phase can be as critical
for stakeholder support as it was in the educational planning process.
There are several construction
delivery methods available to the school district: competitive bidding,
design/build, and construction management. Each state has evolved its own laws
regulating the acceptable forms of construction project delivery. Competitive
bidding is still the most common form of construction delivery. It allows
contractors in each trade, such as general, mechanical, electrical, and
plumbing, to compete for individual prime contracts and form separate contracts
with the school district. In principle, it provides the most open and fair
competition appropriate for a public sector project; however, project
communication and coordination may ultimately affect schedule and budget.
Design/build is most popular with private sector owners but is occasionally
used in the public sector. Under a design/build contract, the owner contracts
with one firm that completes both design and construction of the project under
one contract. Cost and time savings are possible but often with a loss in
quality of the product. Construction management is a service that often is
established simultaneously with the hiring of the architect. A construction
manager's responsibility is to act as project manager throughout the design and
construction process, coordinating the project budget and schedule along the
way. A fourth form of construction delivery is actually a comprehensive project
management delivery service, which includes construction management but also
extends from pre-referendum through occupancy and even facility management,
offering one-stop shopping for facility development. Large school districts
that have multiple projects often contract with project management services.
Project management firms offer a wide array of financial, legal, and
construction services promising economies of scale.
Following the competitive bidding
process, the next phase of the school building process is that of bidding and
negotiation. An Invitation for Bids is publicized to obtain bids from
prime construction contractors. Most states require the school district to
accept the lowest responsible and responsive bidder. However, the school
district reserves the right to reject all bids. Once low bids are accepted, the
school district, as owner, negotiates a contract with each prime contractor.
The architect represents the owner in the construction phase, but the contract
and legal relationship is between the school district, as owner, and each prime
contractor. The construction of the school can last from twelve to eighteen
months, depending on the project scope, material selections, lead times for
shipment to the site, weather, unforeseen subsurface site conditions, and a
variety of other factors. With the use of school buildings being tied to the
school year schedule, project phasing is always an issue that needs to be
addressed. Other factors that can escalate cost and slow the project are change
orders to rectify unforeseen conditions or errors and omissions in the original
construction documents. Once the architect is satisfied that the project is
complete, a Certificate of Substantial Completion is issued and the
owner can legally occupy the facility.
Facility
Management
While the planning, design, and
construction of the school facility may take two to three years, the management
of it will last the entire life cycle of the facility. At the beginning of the
twenty-first century, the mean age of a school building in the United States as
forty-two years, with 28 percent of school buildings built before 1950. Many of
the building materials, furnishings, and equipment will not last half that long
and will require constant upkeep, maintenance, and inevitable replacement to
defer building obsolescence.
The costs of managing school
facilities have historically received much less attention than facility
planning. The percentage of the operating budget for the maintenance and
management of school facilities has steadily decreased, creating a capital
renewal crisis as a result of years of deferred maintenance at all levels of
education.
Best practice requires that a
comprehensive facility maintenance program be established and monitored by the
school district. The maintenance program often includes several distinct
programs, including deferred, preventive, repair/upkeep, and emergency maintenance.
Responsibility for facility management is divided between the district office
and the school site, with the principal being the primary administrator
responsible for the day-to-day operation of the school, including custodial,
food, and transportation services. Custodians are typically hired by the school
district but managed by the principal. Custodial staff is generally responsible
for cleaning the building; monitoring the mechanical, electrical, and plumbing
systems; and providing general maintenance of both building and grounds.
District staff is responsible for long-term maintenance programs and the
procurement of outsourced services for specialized maintenance projects.
Several environmental quality issues
have emerged over the past few decades, such as classroom acoustics, indoor air
quality, water quality, energy conservation, and abatement of asbestos, radon,
and other hazardous materials. Many of these issues require the services of
facility consultants hired through the district. Other issues for the
building-level administrator include safety and security, vandalism and
threats, and acts of violence and terrorism. All of these functions must be
conducted within a constantly changing set of government mandates, such as
energy deregulation, accessibility guidelines, codes, and other regulations and
guidelines at the state and federal levels.
Trends
and Issues
Many communities recognize that in
addition to school facilities being cost effective, they should be more
learner-centered, developmentally and age appropriate, safe, comfortable,
accessible, flexible, diverse, and equitable. By location of new facilities in
residential neighborhoods and partnering with other community-based
organizations, schools are becoming true community centers. In addition,
schools are taking advantage of educational resources in the community, as well
as partnering with museums, zoos, libraries, and other public institutions and
local businesses.
Based on mounting evidence that
smaller schools lead to improved social climate as well as better achievement,
school leaders have begun to create smaller schools or have created schools
within schools.
The design of safe schools
increasingly recognizes the desirability of providing natural, unobtrusive
surveillance mechanisms, rather than installing checkpoints and security
guards. Smaller scaled school buildings allow for both natural surveillance and
territorial ownership, where students and teachers are on familiar terms,
thereby decreasing the possibility that any one student is overlooked.
The self-contained classroom can no
longer provide the variety of learning settings necessary to successfully
support project-based, real-world authentic learning. Research indicates that
smaller class size is a factor contributing to improved achievement. Learning
settings are being designed to support individualized, self-directed learning
and small informal group learning, in addition to traditional large-group
instruction. Rather than lining up classrooms along a long corridor,
instructional areas are being organized around central cores of shared
instructional support.
A trend in the provision of
professional space for teachers has emerged as well. Teacher office space,
including desk and storage, phone/fax, and information technologies, is seen as
essential to the development of teachers as professionals.
Information technology is
precipitating a variety of changes in the organizational and physical form of
schools. With respect to instructional processes, technology is facilitating
the movement toward project-based, self-directed learning and individualized
instruction. As learning becomes increasingly virtual, web-based, and wireless,
it still must physically take place somewhere. As information technology is
becoming ubiquitous, more schools are decentralizing technology throughout the
school building and across the community.
The trend toward smart buildings,
or buildings that are designed and constructed to integrate the technologies of
instruction, telecommunications, and building systems, will have increased
responsiveness to occupant needs as well as the educational process.
Finally, because of the recognition
that spending too much time in buildings can be detrimental not only to health
but also to learning, school buildings will begin to connect more to the
natural environment visually, aurally, and kinesthetically by including
transitional indoor and outdoor learning spaces.
Estimates of cost to repair and
modernize school facilities nationwide continue to grow from the $112 billion
estimated by the U.S. General Accounting Office (GAO) in their landmark 1995
report, to the National Center for Educational Statistics (NCES) estimate of
$127 billion in 1999, to $268.2 billion estimated by the National Education
Association in 2000.
The construction and operation of a
school building involves a substantial expenditure of public funds. The
investment for construction, however, represents only a fraction of the cost of
operating a school over the life of the building. When life-cycle costs of
operating a school are considered (including staff salaries and overhead costs,
in addition to maintenance and operation of the facility), the initial cost of
the school facility may be less than 10 to 15 percent of the life-cycle costs
over a thirty-year period. Properly designing and constructing school buildings
for the realities of management can often provide cost savings over time that
could in turn provide additional funds for education. Operational costs for
power and fuel, water and sewer, garbage disposal, leases and insurance,
building maintenance, and custodial staff are important items in the annual
budget, competing yearly for funds identified for educational delivery.
Building life-cycle cost analysis is admittedly difficult for taxpayers and
school boards to comprehend when available building funds are tight, but the
rewards in effective facility management are potentially great.