10 Steps to Success
Dec 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Mike Kennedy (mkennedy@asumag.com)
Even in a struggling economy, schools and universities can provide stimulating and appealing learning spaces.
As gloomy financial news piles up day after day, schools and universities across the nation are struggling to keep their systems operating. In California, education officials have been warned to prepare for cuts of $2 billion to $4 billion. The Dallas school district has fired hundreds of employees as it wrestles with an estimated deficit of $75 million.
But despite the money woes weighing down education institutions, students continue to show up every morning and fill the seats in millions of classrooms and lecture halls. They are there to learn, and schools and universities have to take advantage of the resources they still have and provide the most effective educational environment possible.
That means that schools and universities have to work harder to provide facilities and campuses that are safe, healthful, modern, flexible, environmentally sensitive, well-managed, inviting and, of course, cost-effective. In short, education administrators have to continue to do what they always have tried to do: maximize their limited resources to provide a high-quality education to their students.
Here are 10 areas that education administrators can target as they work to create and maintain facilities that offer a high-quality learning climate:
Budget
In the best of economic times, education institutions struggle to find enough money to provide the programs and services their communities demand. As 2008 comes to an end, the reality for most schools and universities is that they're going to have to make do with even less. From coast to coast, state and local governments are slashing their spending, and those reductions invariably affect education funding, which makes up a sizable share of most state budgets.
California Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger has warned educators to prepare for cuts of $2 billion to $4 billion. In New York state, Gov. David Paterson is proposing a $585 million reduction in school aid for fiscal year 2008-09, and an $844 million reduction for fiscal 2009-10. The Dallas district has laid off more than 600 employees since the school year began to cope with an estimated $75 million budget shortfall.
Under such financial pressures, education institutions have to be more careful than ever about allocating their resources wisely.
"Schools want to get the most value for the money they spend," says Mark Gerner, an architect with SHW Group. "The degree of scrutiny over every dollar is higher. You need to communicate the value of what you're doing."
Each institution has unique characteristics that will determine how it navigates the rough financial conditions. Earlier this year, the Clark County (Nev.) district cited the shaky economy as one reason it rescinded plans for a $7 billion November bond proposal. But officials in the Los Angeles Unified School District assessed the financial climate and the mood of its constituents, and decided to press ahead with its own $7 billion bond request, which voters overwhelmingly approved last month.
Forward-Thinking
The school facility built a few years ago isn't necessarily the ideal learning environment for the students filling classrooms today, or the ones that will come through the doors a few years hence. So in assessing their facility needs, schools and universities need to have a vision of how education may change and how learning environments will evolve to meet the needs of the coming generations.
"You have to be agile," says Mark Gerner, an architect with SHW Group. "Schools need to be flexible enough to incorporate new technology and accommodate different learning styles."
Technological advances are making it possible for education institutions to individualize learning for students, and schools and universities should provide spaces for formal and informal teaching and learning to occur.
Community
Persuading people to support education with their tax dollars is a constant task for schools and universities. When economic conditions are poor, as they are now, education institutions can bolster the support they receive by making their institutions integral parts of the communities that lie beyond campus boundaries.
Establishing connections with the community can have financial benefits — schools can team up with partners such as other governmental entities and share the costs of building and operating joint-use facilities. The facilities will be used more extensively when they are opened up to others in the community besides students, and community members will be less likely to view schools as something separate from the rest of the neighborhood.
Schools and universities that seek out strong connections with the people that surround their campuses make it possible for those neighbors to experience for themselves the important role an education institution can have in shaping and leading a community.
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