Lasting Impression

Everyone loves a bargain, especially when money is tight. Swayed by a low price tag, we plunk down our cash and are pleased with ourselves for unearthing a good deal that leaves some money in our pockets.

That feeling of satisfaction can erode over time, however, as the bargain item turns out to be less than ideal. It may prove to be inadequate in accomplishing the job for which it was purchased. It may cost so much to operate that it's not worth the trouble. It may break down and continually be in the repair shop. Its functions may quickly become outdated and unnecessary.

Many schools and universities thought they were getting a good deal when they were building education facilities in the 1950s and 1960s. But the K-12 and higher-education spaces constructed to accommodate the millions of baby-boomer students no longer look like the quick-fix bargain they did years ago. Low-quality materials and construction, inefficient energy systems and uninspiring designs have left many schools and universities with facilities that are deteriorating and saddled with high maintenance and repair costs.

Today's architects and administrators have tried to learn from the errors of their predecessors and are striving to be smarter about how they plan and build education facilities. Rather than focus only on the initial construction cost of a project, designers and educators are placing greater emphasis on how much a facility will cost over its entire life. By using life-cycle costing, education institutions can have solid data to show that in some cases, spending a little more at an early stage can lead to savings over the life of a building.

“The true cost of a school is much more than the price to design and build it,” says the Collaborative for High Performance Schools' Best Practices Manual. “The long-term costs of operating and maintaining the facility must also be included. Only by evaluating all three of these parameters can a community understand how much a new school really ‘costs.’”

The hurried past

Talk to architects and educators about the school facilities that rose in the 1950s and 1960s, and they don't have much good to say about them.

“In the early 1900s, schools and courthouses were sources of pride,” says Bob McGraw, an architect and chief operating officer at Kingscott Architects in Kalamazoo, Mich. “A lot of thought went into them, and they built them to last. After World War II, they got away from that.”

One obvious reason schools got away from that is the mushrooming student enrollment experienced in the 1950s and 1960s. Enrollment in public elementary and secondary school districts soared from a little more than 25 million in 1949 to more than 45.5 million in 1969.

“Back then it was, ‘We need schools, and we need them now — we don't have time for that [life-cycle] stuff,’” says Don Carney, building management specialist with the Alaska Department of Education & Early Development.

At the same time, schools and school districts consolidated into larger entities — in 1949, the United States had more than 83,000 school districts; by 1970, there were less than 18,000. As a result, many communities lost their schools, and the connection between school and community deteriorated.

“In the last 10 to 15 years, we've gotten back to taking the longer view,” says McGraw.

The renewed focus on schools and universities as a long-term investment has manifested itself not only in the hundreds of billions of dollars spent over the past few years on education facilities, but also in how those facilities are designed, constructed, operated and maintained. Increasing numbers of architects and educators are using high-performance design strategies and environmentally friendly materials and equipment to create efficient, long-lasting facilities. Using life-cycle-cost analysis can provide the data to convince those holding the purse strings that sustainable design and construction practices are cost-effective over a building's life. The costs of using a school facility have taken on greater significance in recent years as more communities are using buildings the entire year, and on nights and weekends.

“High-performance design is gaining momentum,” says Tim Dufault, an architect with the Cuningham Group in Minneapolis.