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.
Health and Safety
The financial constraints confronting many schools and universities may prevent administrators from pursuing renovations and other campus improvements as aggressively as they would like, but education institutions must make sure that the spaces students will occupy for several hours a day do not endanger health or safety.
Providing acceptable indoor air quality is especially critical for schools because of the greater vulnerability children can have to contaminants. Administrators should make sure facilities are designed and equipped properly to keep pollutants out, provide fresh air, and prevent buildup of moisture that leads to mold growth.
Another aspect of health that schools and universities are being compelled to address is nutrition. As concern grows about obesity problems among young people, health advocates and educators are looking more closely at the lunchrooms and dining halls that feed millions of students each day.
Schools and universities are becoming more aggressive about discouraging consumption of soft drinks and junk-food snacks, and altering their menus to provide students with meals that have less fat and are more nutritious.
Security
Effective learning will not take place in an environment where students constantly are looking over their shoulders in fear of intimidation by school bullies or the next explosion of violence from a troubled classmate. The National Center for Education Statistics (NCES) says that in 2005, 1.2 percent of students age 12 to 18 reported being a victim of violence at their schools.
Student-on-student violence can occur among friends, as it did last month, when a 15-year-old girl was shot to death by a classmate in a Fort Lauderdale, Fla., high school. Or a student can be victimized by random violence, as it did the day before the Florida incident, when a 14-year-old boy entered a Montrose, Colo., high school, where he was not a student, and slashed the throat of a 17-year-old girl. (The girl underwent surgery after the attack and is recovering.)
Violence also plagues higher-education campuses. Less than a year after the tragic killings at Virginia Tech in Blacksburg, a gunman at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb killed six and wounded 18 in a shooting rampage.
The effects of violent episodes can spread far beyond the victim and contaminate the climate of an entire campus. Schools and universities have worked to deter violence on their campuses and respond more quickly when incidents occur. Those strategies include adding school resource officers or other public-safety personnel; outfitting facilities and campus grounds with surveillance cameras and access-control systems; establishing anti-bullying and other intervention programs that can identify students or others on a campus who may be prone to violence; and building a comprehensive and speedy communications system that can alert students, staff members and others about potential threats and provide guidance on how to respond to them.
School designs can create more open spaces so that teachers and administrators can see who is coming and going, and monitor student behavior more easily.
Environmental Stewardship
Economic hardship may tempt some schools and universities to cut short-term costs at the expense of long-term benefits. But the education institutions that have embraced sustainable design and construction, and other green practices, know that short-sighted facility decisions can cost more in the long run.
The embrace of the green movement by the education community continues to grow as administrators realize that environmentally sensitive facilities consume fewer resources, cause less pollution, provide more healthful spaces, last longer and offer important learning opportunities for students. (For a greater examination of green schools, see "10 Paths to Green".)
Maintenance
Over the years, when schools and universities have faced budget crises, the funds allocated for maintenance often have been the first to get cut. In the 1970s, when student enrollment began to decline and many school facilities were allowed to age and deteriorate, the practice of "deferred maintenance" was so common that the phrase became an embarrassing symbol of the neglect.
Schools and universities have learned the hard way that inadequate maintenance inevitably leads to more serious problems and shortens the life of a facility. If deferring maintenance is the knee-jerk response to any budget crisis, education institutions will never catch up and their facilities will be plagued with maintenance trouble forever.
Computerized maintenance-management programs can help school administrators establish a regular, comprehensive schedule for building maintenance tasks and use objective standards for determining which jobs should take priority.
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