Scores of schools have decided to close in the U.S. once again, and numerous districts are postponing plans to reopen in the face of the skyrocketing covid-19 cases. In considering the reopening of school buildings, what steps can you take to create the safest environment possible for your students, teachers and administrators?  Current public health concerns presented by the pandemic pose a challenge to the natural and desired collaborations that are central to teacher-student interactions and the learning process. As a result, educators and architects are having to rethink ways to enable learning while addressing the health, safety, and welfare of occupants in school environments. While working with clients on existing and in-design new projects, Spiezle Architectural Group, Inc. has identified remedies to mitigate health risks within school buildings and create safer spaces for school occupancy by focusing on five major categories: Policies and Procedure, Site Arrival, Building Envelope, Building Interiors, and Building Systems. Although this list is not comprehensive, we provide guidance to incorporate these strategies in each category below.

POLICIES AND PROCEDURES

Although not directly related to the physical building, adjustments to school policies and procedures complement changes in design and building operation and are equally important when mitigating viral spread in schools. Schools should consider the following recommendations when updating policies and procedures to address health concerns:

• Follow the recommended health behaviors listed in the Center for Disease Control and Prevention’s (CDC) Considerations for Schools (CDC, 2020) and other local ordinances that are designed to reduce the spread of Covid-19 and related viruses.
• Educate staff and families when they/their child(ren) should stay home and when they can return to school should there be a personal case or direct exposure to the virus and institute pre-screening and active on-site screening procedures.
• Require proper personal protective equipment (PPE) for all occupants and educate them on how/when to use what equipment as well as washing and cleanliness practices.
• Form a Pandemic Response Team at each school to address site-specific concerns, evaluate actions taken, and lead efforts to implement new policies and procedures.
• Implement a thorough building-wide cleaning and disinfection protocol as well as escalation practices for all areas and surfaces after an identified case.

SITE ARRIVAL

To reduce congestion and practice safe distance requirements when entering the site, consider transportation schedules, bus configuration and seating arrangements, and arrival from all sources (bus, cars, walkers, etc.):

• Incorporate specific signage to help aid wayfinding and direct traffic to minimize congestion.
• Shift school occupants to areas that are separated by safe distance to coincide with physical distancing requirements and place limitations on parking spaces.
• Expand the area and increase the number of locations for drop-offs and arrivals to mitigate student congestion at high traffic times.
• Reduce congestion by creating additional entrances equipped with temperature check measures.

BUILDING ENVELOPE

While areas of concern at the building envelope may be small in quantity, areas such as entrances are crucial to consider. These have the potential for the most contact and infringe on physical distancing recommendations. Some recommendations include:

• Incorporate automatic door openers at select entrances to promote touchless entry, reducing the potential transfer of the virus.
• Install touchless thermal temperature detection systems at entrances that quickly scan all entry visitors to alert occupants of potential threats.
• Maximize use of daylight and natural ventilation to improve environmental conditions and health of occupants.

BUILDING INTERIORS

Primary concerns on the interior is maintenance of social distancing and reducing the need to touch common surfaces. Some options to mitigate the health concerns on the interior are listed below:

• Apply antimicrobial coatings to commonly used surfaces to reduce the threat of contact with contagions.
• Install automatic soap dispensers at wet areas and add automatic hand sanitizer stations throughout the facility to provide occupants several opportunities to sanitize throughout the day.
• Install hands-free door hardware, which allows occupants to traverse the building without contacting surfaces that are typically known to spread contaminants.
• Install temporary, movable partitions in assembly spaces to segregate different groups of people.
• Use transparent partitions to provide required separation while also adding to the feeling of collaboration desired for group educational tasks.
• Restrict directional flow of travel with interior signage and floor decals to help maintain safe physical distancing.

BUILDING SYSTEMS

Building Systems encompass considerations for three major sub-categories: Mechanical, Electrical, and Plumbing Systems. Some recommendations for each are listed below:

Mechanical Systems

• Review and balance systems to ensure proper ventilation rates, filtration and fresh air levels.
• Upgrade HVAC unit filtration systems to CDC/ASHRAE recommendations but consider that not all existing systems may be capable of such upgrades without impacting ventilation rates which could be counterproductive.
• Proper humidity levels can help our bodies respond to viral exposures. Maintain healthy relative humidity (RH) inside schools to reduce infection rates. Ideal RH within a building should range from 40-60% but care should be taken to prevent a RH being too low or rising over 60% which can have negative effects.
• Integrate bipolar Ionization technology into HVAC systems, which helps to neutralize particulate matter, bacteria and virus cells, odorous gases, aerosols, and VOCs. These systems can be implemented cost effectively.

Electrical Systems

• Consider ultraviolet lighting which has been shown to be effective in de-activating many contaminants, bacteria, and viruses. Caution must be taken to minimize risk of skin exposure.
• Install touchless lighting controls that work off occupancy sensors to minimize touch surfaces.

Plumbing Systems

• Clean and flush water coolers and water heaters prior to re-occupying buildings. This may assist with reducing the accumulation of virus-containing debris in the water-supply system.
• Replace water coolers with an automatic bottle-filling station to reduce potential of personal contact with water-delivery system.
• Transform manual plumbing fixtures to ones that are compatible with hands-free operation.

While no one anticipated the level of impact from this pandemic, it is important to look for bright spots and come up with new designs that are more equitable and more consistent with the future learning environment.

References

Center for Disease Control and Prevention. (2020). Considerations for schools.

AIA, 2020. Re-Occupancy Assessment Tool V1.0

Spiezle Architectural Group, Inc. (2020). Re-Occupancy Assessment: Holmdel Township Schools

Principal Steven G. Siegel, AIA, LEED ^AP   and Project Manager Daya Irene Taylor, Ph.D., RA, bring a wealth of experience and creativity to Spiezle Architectural Group.

The post Architectural Strategies to Combat COVID-19 in Schools appeared first on School Construction News.

When schools shut down in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, society became acutely aware of the significant roles our educational system fulfills. Above and beyond an education, schools provide meals to families struggling with food security and supervision that enables parents to go to work. Redesigning our approach to schools so they can effectively serve our communities is essential to thriving in the new normal. Districts are scrambling to create back-to-school plans to keep students and teachers safe and still foster a learning environment. While specifics vary from district to district, even from school to school, based on unique needs and circumstances, most involve some combination of virtual learning and on campus time options.

Immediate Solutions

Most immediate solutions must adapt process and behavior around existing facilities: staggered start times, staggered recess and passing periods, spacing out desks, limiting bathroom capacities, designating floors or buildings to specific student groups, adding filters to HVAC systems, mask wearing, frequent handwashing, and keeping the same group of students and teacher together through-out the day. These measures address both hygiene and allows for the isolation and quarantine of a specific group should a student or teacher become infected.

While weathering the current state of affairs by implementing these measures can mitigate the spread, it does rely heavily on teachers, aids, administration and students’ cognizance of their behaviors, such as frequent handwashing and wearing masks, especially in light of July 9 statements by the World Health Organization that current evidence suggests the virus is airborne, capable of spreading through aerosol and not specifically through droplets. In acknowledgement of the limitations of social distance requirements and existing facilities, the educational system is adjusting how they measure instruction. For instance, the state of California recently lowered the number of seat hours requirements, a metric based on how many in-person/in-class instructional hours a student must have in a given academic year.

Forward-Looking Solutions

Immediate responses to keep students and staff safe seem to be more of an exercise in organization but evaluating how current school design is falling short in the face of a pandemic provides an opportunity to innovate new school designs that will be more resilient in the future. Though many of these ideas have existed in architecture for literally thousands of years, the introduction and our subsequent reliance upon mechanical systems alongside theories that eliminating distractions from nature and natural light would help students focus resulted in their abandonment.

We must assume that for now, we’ll still have to comply with established district standards. While we cannot anticipate with any degree of certainty whether classroom size will increase or decrease, there are elements that can be reintroduced into school design immediately to facilitate healthier school environments. For one, multiple hand washing stations in each classroom makes it easier to keep hands clean, wash masks, and generally practice good hygiene. Making all restrooms single occupancy makes them easier to keep clean and addresses social issues that we are becoming more conscious of.

In addition to addressing these obvious sanitation issues, in more temperate climates, designing spaces with operable windows to promote natural ventilation through a stack affect: low windows or vents, typically on the south facing wall of a classroom if possible, and high awning windows on the north side of the room allows hot air to move out through the high windows while drawing cool air in through the lower windows. In addition to increased natural air circulation, this allows for the opportunity to increase the amount of available natural light and a view to exterior spaces, which have been proven to increase information uptake and concentration in students.

In recent years, it has become more accepted that there is no “right way” to learn. As a result, teachers have embraced alternative classroom layouts and seating, allowing students to find what works for them. Not only has this approach yielded unquestionably strong positive response from the students and enhanced academic performance, it is easier to reorganize these classroom spaces into socially distanced arrangements.

Going a step further, taking classrooms outside where possible or even using roll up doors that allow for a blurred boundary between indoor and outdoor space increases the natural ventilation that limits the spread of airborne disease and fosters a positive learning environment. This could mean longer overhangs that shade the classrooms and can shelter students from inclement weather if it otherwise allows for outside learning. This could also mean classrooms opening into a courtyard that doubles as a larger outdoor multipurpose space.

Creative, flexible spaces, which are more adaptable to approaches both towards teaching and student learning styles, allow teachers and administrators to quickly pivot between close person-to-person interaction and socially distanced arrangements when we’re faced with another event that requires us to do so.

With 14 years of experience as a designer and project manager on educational projects, Clarke Forrest of Dahlin Group Architecture Planning brings a multi-skilled and fine-tuned approach to all facets of educational architecture.

The post Resilient School Design and Lessons Learned from COVID-19 appeared first on School Construction News.

The uncertainty surrounding the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic makes it challenging for college and university faculty members, administrators and facility directors to create a plan for the return of students to campus this fall. Most campuses are currently releasing their plans—usually with a mix of online, in-person, and blended instruction—with campus-specific approaches to scheduling courses and determining who’s on campus and when.

As architects and designers, we’re helping schools navigate these unknowns by creating tools that can quickly and efficiently model multiple scenarios, allowing school administrators to react nimbly to changing inputs and criteria. The following five suggestions summarize key considerations in this process, published by HGA in the new guide “Returning to Campus: Creating Healthy Environments for Learning:”

1. Be nimble and flexible

By now, the 6-foot social distancing circles applied to classroom environments, which result in de-densification and reduced capacity, are familiar diagrams to us all. But too often, these diagrams don’t take into consideration the circulation patterns into and out of rooms or consider the impact that schedule changes — adding more sections or increasing the hours of operation — have on the overall capacity on campus. A flexible and nimble approach examines alternative teaching locations, including repurposing non-traditional spaces on campus for teaching.

2. Think outside the classroom

Much of the focus has been on the interior of classrooms and other learning spaces, but the campus environment includes many other building types. Mapping pedestrian traffic and movement at the campus scale and pulling in data sets like staffing numbers can predict potential hot spots of social interaction. How might services be redistributed on campus to minimize the need for faculty and students to travel to receive them?

3. Leverage your facilities manager

Building systems – including air handling equipment – can play an important role in mitigating the spread of the virus between occupants and improving indoor air quality. How does the campus re-opening plan look out for the health and safety of the new front line of essential workers, including cleaning staff, on-campus clinic staff, and residence hall staff? Understanding which buildings are equipped with the technologies to support filtration and minimum outdoor air rates may have an impact on which buildings are re-opened on campus, and when.

4. Don’t forget about your faculty

Much of the narrative in recent months has been about keeping students healthy and well on campus, leaving many faculty members to ask what is being done to protect them. On campuses with traditional-aged college students, faculty members may be more at risk from the impacts of the virus than many students, based purely on demographics. Even if students return to campus in-person, many faculty may need to have the option for continued remote instruction.

5. Communicate cultural change

We are in the middle of a great cultural experiment that is re-inventing societal norms and creating new patterns of social engagement. To be effective, a change to societal norms — including the adherence to mask wearing and the ability to self-regulate physical distancing requirements — requires buy-in on the part of those affected by the change. Involve your community in the creation of policies that affect campus life, and allow them to develop new ways of engaging with one another to maintain and build community.

The decision on how to safely reopen campus buildings for teaching and learning is complex, especially as new research is published daily on the risk factors involved. Leveraging design and engagement tools to model multiple scenarios quickly allows campuses to react nimbly and be prepared. Campuses that adapt strategically to a new, blended learning environment will be prepared to address the uncertainties in higher education for years to come.

Rebecca Celis, AIA, is vice president at HGA, specializing in projects for higher education. Ena Murphy is a planner at HGA. For more information on HGA’s research on the impact of the coronavirus on higher education, visit https://hga.com/returning-to-campus-during-covid-19/.

The post Five Considerations Before Reopening Campus appeared first on School Construction News.

WASHINGTON, D.C.—During this global pandemic, we know that parents and educators working from home are trying to keep school-age children on track, using an enriched curriculum, and out of harm’s way. We commend your efforts and want to support you.

USGBC’s Learning Lab online education platform offers lessons and activities that are well suited for distance learning, and many that are ideal for implementing at home, while being academically rigorous and fostering sustainability literacy. Additionally, many Learning Lab Partners have mobilized to provide training and experiences that can help educators and parents succeed for the sake of students.

All Learning Lab lessons are aligned to standards, support hands-on learning and come with guidance for implementation.

Check out our recommended resources for K–12 educators and parents. Listed below are the lessons we have made available for free—simply log in with your existing Learning Lab or USGBC account or create one. Purchase an annual subscription for $40 to access Learning Lab’s 700+ lessons in English and Spanish.

Click here to review the Learning Lab offerings from the Center for Green Schools.

Jenny Wiedower leads the Center for Green Schools’ efforts to support teaching and learning as a key component of any green school. As K-12 Education Manager, she leads the development of USGBC’s K-12 education platform, Learning Lab.

The post Center for Green Schools Offers Educators Online Learning Platform appeared first on School Construction News.