Public Health and Sustainability Concerns in Schools
Controlled Isolation
A second realization regarding schools and health is the need, in some cases, to make spaces smaller to isolate students, teachers, or visitors. Some of this is driven by the general health guidelines to avoid large group gatherings. Hence, larger communal spaces in schools are either being underutilized or avoided, or they can be broken temporarily into smaller spaces. This view is being reinforced by administrators and teachers who are indicating that they are trying to change large rooms into smaller classrooms but would like the flexibility to open the spaces back to their original size in the future. In these cases, operable glass walls can provide a solution as well. They can be installed to break up large areas when needed and then fold or slide back out of the way when not required. Designing this flexibility into new school buildings allows for optimizing the ways that this is done. Nonetheless, it is possible to retrofit school buildings very successfully with operable glass walls for this purpose as well.
In other cases, there may be a need to directly isolate or quarantine students at risk or to separate any visitors to the school from students and staff. The AIA report addresses nurses’ offices or clinic areas directly in this regard. It suggests that not only should social distancing be practiced, but temporary spaces may also need to be created. Specifically, the recommendations include: “1) Identifying a space to temporarily and comfortably isolate a symptomatic student or staff member that is separated from non-symptomatic occupants, including students who need to obtain other medical care; 2) Creating a self-contained medical room just outside the main school facility; and 3) Establishing a “nurse’s zone” treatment area and integrating minimum social distancing between resting cots and using privacy curtains between beds.”
In these situations, operable glass walls can be used to address all of these needs. They can be installed in an existing space to separate and isolate people when needed and then opened back up when a larger space is more appropriate. This approach is clearly useful all of the time, regardless of the disease or condition that is being protected against. Therefore, retrofitting or including such a flexible nurse/clinic area into a school will provide a well-designed solution for limiting the spread of disease for the full life of the school building. This approach can also be less costly than constructing permanent partitions with doors, etc., so it is worthy of consideration on several fronts.
FLEXIBLE SPACE CASE STUDY: THE CONVERTIBLE SCHOOL
Photos courtesy of NanaWall Systems
Project: East Elementary School
Location: Lubbock, Texas
Architect: Parkhill, Smith & Cooper (PSC)
The Project: Needing to expand its existing schools and add new facilities, the Lubbock-Cooper Independent District in northwest Texas has been building 21st century schools that enable collaboration, both in terms of flexible groupings of students and teamwork by teachers. Much of the design work for the district has been done by Parkhill, Smith & Cooper (PSC), an architectural firm with deep roots in the development of 21st century schools. PSC was one of seven companies that helped develop a modern school specification for the U.S. Department of Defense Education Activity (DODEA), which operates 160 schools associated with U.S. military bases located in 11 countries, seven states, and two territories. Concepts developed there have transferred into the public sector and are the heart of the 21st century school movement.
The Planning Process: According to PSC’s Michael Strain, AIA, project architect for East Elementary, design of the school was approached not simply as a building but as “a tool for learning, a tool for teachers and students to do what they need to do as well.” The design process was highly collaborative, with a select group of teachers from the district working with PSC over a period of two and a half months of interviews, exercises, tours at other campuses, and architects sitting in at school to observe the teaching style.
“Over the course of my career,” remarks District Superintendent Keith Bryant, “a lot of teachers have told me, ‘If I could just knock that wall down so I could collaborate with my fellow teachers, I could get so much more done and make learning so much more relevant.’ So, we began design with that in mind.”
The Design: “The goal was that every inch of the building would be able to be used as a teaching tool,” Bryant says. He supervised the 2018 creation of East Elementary School and its ground-up design with the overarching goal of providing educators as much flexibility as possible. Central to this strategy was the use of a series of interior moveable glass walls that allow learning spaces of an entire grade-level to be reconfigured on the fly, facilitating creativity and collaboration for both students and teachers. The resulting school, says Bryant, “has expanded the opportunities beyond what we expected.”
Architect Michael Strain explains that the plan organizes each grade level into a “neighborhood,” with six classrooms grouped around a central hub. “We call them neighborhoods because we want them to feel like family units.” The glass walls that separate each class from the hub can be easily folded back to join that classroom to the central. The walls between classrooms can also be opened, allowing numerous configurations of one, two, three, or more classes connecting, maximizing the space available and transforming what are essentially hallways into additional learning spaces.
The visibility provided by the glass walls has a benefit to instructors, points out Michael Strain. “We design our neighborhoods to make sure a teacher can see everything in that neighborhood from their classroom. Teachers like that visibility.” It is part of the security design of the school, so teachers can see anything happening in the corridor before it reaches their classrooms. East Elementary has five layers of physical security between the front entrance and any neighborhood. The operable wall is a sixth security layer, and there is a retreat closet in each classroom.
The Results: East Elementary was the first entirely new school that the district built using the 21st century school model, but it was preceded by additions and renovations in other schools, where numerous movable walls were employed. Movable glass walls have been key to the physical realization of the design concept and success of the schools.
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