Texas School Design Institute

In early November, teams of associate and assistant superintendents, project and district architects, and school board members from four of the largest school districts in Texas met in Austin for a School Design Institute. Each district came with a project in the early stages of planning and specific questions about their plans. AAF united them with eight architects from around the country along with an architectural educator and a sustainable transportation expert. Together they tackled a range of school design issues that many rapidly growing districts across the U.S. are experiencing

The Texas Association of School Boards (TASB) recruited the districts and helped kick off the institute. Bill Nemir, TASB’s director of the Leadership Team Services division, charged the group to "think wildly." Each team discussed their respective project plans while the facilitators—two architects per team—drew the concepts on drafting paper. Through this process, literally the visualization of educational and community goals, the teams experienced changes in perspectives.

The project Fort Worth brought to the institute illustrates educational researcher Arthur W. Chickering’s saying, "The first part of wisdom is calling things by their right name." Fort Worth came to the institute with an idea for the Pascal Relief Elementary School—a school meant to relieve overcrowding—to be located in a park adjacent to an existing middle school and in which the city also wanted to build a community center. By the end of the institute the Fort Worth team, including a parks department assistant director, presented a re-envisioned project called The Rosemont Park Community Learning Center. This would be a wondrous hybrid of school and community center complete with a vegetation covered green roof to offset the use of park land. The existing Rosemont Middle School ball fields will to be incorporated into the park and the complex of middle school, elementary school, community center and park are now thought of as part of a partnership.

Klein Independent School District’s project focused on the creation of a new Early Childhood/Pre-K Center that would act as a prototype for additional centers throughout the district. They sought answers to design questions such as, how can the design encourage parental involvement, incorporate a public health clinic and balance physical fitness, safety, and education? Through the process of working with these design issues, the district realized that the center should be sited near or next to existing elementary schools and the prototype should be made up of a kit of interchangeable elements. This interchangeable kit of parts would allow the center to be better fitted to different sites without having to completely redesign the building each time it was built.

North East Independent School Districts came to the institute with an existing middle school prototype that it sought to view through a LEED, CHPS, or sustainability lens and wondered how sustainability might be expanded across the district. Like Klein’s solution for the Early Childhood/Pre-K Center, North East recognized that they needed to think of their existing prototype as a kit of parts so that they could better fit a good design efficiently into the site. Additionally, the district was struck by how they could combine some functions of two schools, such as gyms and kitchens, to reduce the overall size and the resulting impact of the buildings on the site.

Cypress-Fairbanks Independent School District brought plans for a 179-acre site on which it plans to place a high school, middle school, and elementary school. Their chief concerns were how to design for personalized instruction and small learning communities when the student population of the finished 3 school site is expected to be 6,000. They also sought opportunities to share facilities between the schools. For Cy-Fair, just the discussion during the institute had some of the district team members on the phone changing the utility plan half way through the first day.

Like many suburbs across the country, Cypress-Fairbanks and Klein grapple with the lack of distinct town centers. In these communities, school buildings are one of the few civic elements available to create a sense of place and identity for all residents. As the teams imagined how the design and functionality of school buildings might accomplish these goals, the architects drew sketches of open, welcoming entrances flanked on either side by school wings like a pair of arms extended to embrace the community. They also looked for ways to site the building to make it more central and accessible to the community as well as the students.

At the conclusion, we asked all participants to tell us how their understanding of design changed as a result of the institute. Here are some of their responses:

The challenges faced by these four Texas school districts are shared by many suburban and urban schools. Do they sound familiar to you? If your school district would like to participate in an AAF School Design Institute, please contact us at gsbd@archfoundation.org. To read about the impact of institutes on other school districts, download the reports at http://www.archfoundation.org/aaf/aaf/Publications.htm

Participants