Buildings can enhance educational experience

By: John MacDonald September 1, 2008 12:00 AM - It’s practically a given that education is central to the continued success of our region, economy and society. Investment in the young, new immigrants and life-long learners will determine to a great extent our future quality of life; perhaps never more than now. If only a revolutionary trajectory will allow us to meet the challenges of the 21st Century, then our system of education must be a beacon and landmark for this journey.
And so, every September, it's back to school we go – literally for some, and metaphorically for the rest of us.  
As a civic institution, the school house has a unique place in architecture. The school is the only building that we are required by law to attend. Sure, a small minority of us must from time to time report to prison or be quarantined in hospital. But we're not forced to the polling station, or legally obliged to attend places of spiritual worship.
No. The school is uniquely chosen. It's of such fundamental importance to us that we all must pass through it. The school is our portal to the future, for both individual and the common good.
My own children attended Suddaby School (formerly Berlin Central) for their primary years. The 150 year old building is prominently located along Frederick Street, and participates in Downtown Kitchener’s campus of institutional buildings (Centre in the Square, courthouses, Regional Headquarters among others).
Despite the lack of air-conditioning, and the seasonal tendency of the hardwood floorboards to swell and roll like drunken sailors, the grounds and classrooms provide amenities absent from more recent school designs: high ceilings and wonderful walls of windows, tree-shaded play areas both soft and hard, high brick walls for ball games of red-butt, a skating rink for student and community use in the winter – plus  a playing field.
But one item of essential school design was missed at Suddaby: portables! Not to worry, for our children were able to experience these joyless intruders during their next years (and by some bizarre stroke of perversity, as a venue for strings music class no less) at Stanley Park Senior Public School.
If the school is the most important building in the community (and I cite the legal requirement to attend it as proof of this assertion), then why is its design and construction so underfunded, so joyless, so absent from civic prominence, and so often so lacking in shame and decency that portables, once admitted, are given a permanent place on its grounds?
When architects get around to discussing school design, the following story is often retold.
In response to a series of amazing and gloriously vibrant schools designed in the 1990’s across British Columbia (and as much within budgets as their more mundane counterparts) officials in that province began to fret that schools with such attention to amenity, and the positive experience of the very children forced to inhabit them, were setting a bad example. They simply looked too good! Strawberry Vale, an award-winning rural elementary school near Victoria, designed by Patkau Architects (the same architectural firm that is responsible for Waterloo’s Clay and Glass Gallery), was a lightning rod for the issue.
Adele Weder, reporting in the design publication Canadian Architect in 2001, described the situation thus: “In the words of government officials and detractors within the school district, the Patkau-designed school was "extravagant," "self-indulgent" and sent "the wrong message to the taxpayer," constituting proof in its critics' minds that public school construction budgets were higher than they needed to be. The issue drew bureaucrats' attention to other prominent recent school architecture in British Columbia, which, like Strawberry Vale, appeared to them to be so high-end as to suggest an improper use of public money.”
Not that the budget was necessarily extravagant, just that the result appeared so. The resulting strategy of slashing school construction budgets has in some instances led to leaking buildings, higher maintenance costs, and other “collateral damage”.
The evidence is fairly clear that students’ exposure to natural light and other design factors for schools positively affects their rate of attendance, achievement, physical growth, well-being and even dental health. Yet we continue to tolerate the banality of our schools and consider portables and light locked classrooms an acceptable solution for our children’s well-being.
Part of this off-track decision-making stems from how funding formulae and school board policies chase our lifestyle expectations, short term tax-payer expectations, and wasteful urban design practices. The drive for larger schools, constant changes in enrolment and catchment area boundaries, and the resulting crazy levels of expenditure for a massive system of school bussing are all predicated on the idea that the school must follow the city and its unsustainable patterns of density. Schools are now built as part of a larger strategic game, rather than for their fundamental value as landmarks and touchstones in our communities. This impermanence of schools and the plethora of portables are often explained as a prudent flexibility in the face of change and dwindling dollars. Regardless of the rhetoric, it’s a reluctance to build facilities of exceptional and inspirational quality that lead to educational and civic improvement.
Not only have we much to learn, we’ve even failed to study the lessons we’ve been given so far. Part of our ongoing education should involve a healthy debate, “going to school” on the issue of why our most important public institution is now notionally and sometimes literally on wheels, underfunded in its construction and renewal, absent from its civic duties and prominence within our cities, and joyless in its design.