SEATTLE—The new Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences Middle School is now complete. Located in a densely populated urban neighborhood in Seattle—at the intersection of Union Street and 13th Avenue in Capitol Hill—the new six-story middle school was designed by LMN Architects to leverage the limited site and connect with adjacent school buildings and the neighborhood. The general contractor on this project was GLY Construction, Inc. The cost of the project is confidential.

“What was originally visualized as a collaborative, innovative, dynamic and student-centric learning space has fully come to life and exceeded our expectations for our middle-school students, teachers and community,” says Rob Phillips, Seattle Academy’s head of school.

Middle School academic spaces occupy the upper floors in the new 51,372-square-foot building, while the lower floors provide for entry, administration, general gathering, maker space and music instruction. A gymnasium and outdoor rooftop playfield provide much-needed physical activity space.

“Beyond the programmatic and site complexities, this project reaffirms the important role of schools in the urban context,” explains LMN Design Partner Wendy Pautz.

“An innovative approach to stacked program and connectivity between students, classes, grades, the broader school and the community provides an educational experience centered on team-oriented projects and problem-based learning, grounded in the larger context of its neighborhood. We hope this new project contributes to the well-being of the community, the education of its children and the social activity along the Union Street corridor.”

Pautz says the primary design challenge was to integrate and reconcile the intrinsic challenges of a constrained urban site with the program requirements needed to support this new middle school.

“A vertically stacked building configuration incorporates classrooms, laboratories, collaboration spaces and indoor and outdoor athletic spaces into a contemporary and flexible design. Beyond the programmatic and site complexities, the Seattle Academy of Arts and Sciences Middle School reaffirms the important role of schools in the urban context.”

Each middle school grade occupies a floor within the building, with classrooms organized around a collaborative learning space to accommodate project-based learning and cross-discipline discovery. These spaces are designed as a series of double-height, stepped interior volumes that cascade between floors, enhancing visual and physical connectivity within the stacked program and creating opportunities for students to observe, cross paths, interact and engage beyond the four walls of the classroom.

Daylight, natural ventilation and operable windows allow for control of each of the spaces and promotes connection to the world outside of the building. The building’s coordinated stair and elevator landings ensure that students moving through the building in groups always converge at the same destination. An outdoor space at the entry also provides a welcoming gathering place.

Each classroom floor features a different accent color while a ribbon of faceted panels on the feature walls and ceilings. This helps to connect these spaces and provide visual continuity both within the building and into the neighborhood.

The façade is a mix of gray- and cream-colored bricks that fade vertically from dark to light, while multi-colored red sunshades provide a contrast against the brick backdrop.

LMN Architects has designed and built projects for multiple independent schools in the Seattle area, as well as the Foster School of Business Paccar Hall and the Paul G. Allen School of Computer Science and Engineering at the University of Washington, and the Lee Center for the Arts at Seattle University.

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Kenneth Trump, president of Cleveland-based consulting firm National School Safety and Security Services, has 25 years of experience at public and private schools in urban, suburban and rural settings. He has worked with jurisdictions in all 50 states and has authored several books and articles on school safety. He discussed the topic with School Construction News during a phone interview.

Q: What are your thoughts on swine flu in regards to safety and security at school facilities?

A: I am not a health expert, but I do know that schools have been encouraged for several years to have pandemic emergency plans in place for pandemic flu situations. It’s something that schools should have had on their radar for several years, and it is part of the requirements and recommendations for federal school emergency planning grants.

When the recent swine flu incident hit, it shouldn’t have been a surprise. Schools should have had some guidelines at least to help them get started to approach the situation in a cognitive, rational manner, rather than an emotional, knee-jerk manner.

Unfortunately, we saw too many schools that panicked and made knee-jerk reactions. It appeared they did not have plans in place and were flying by the seat of their pants.

Fortunately, things seemed to level off a bit once schools connected with their local public health officials and started making joint, rational, sound decisions based on the expertise of the public health community.

Those partnerships need to be established ahead of time. You can’t write a crisis plan or a pandemic plan while the crisis is happening. Largely, we saw that schools were not specifically responding to the threat, but in a knee-jerk manner to parental fear, anxiety and hype.

Q: Do you think most schools have pandemic and crisis-communications plans?

A: I don’t think they do. Most schools have some type of crisis plan, but they don’t have a crisis-communication plan. Also, crisis plans often sit on a shelf collecting dust instead of being tested, updated and exercised with staff training.

Q: What are the key components for a crisis-communications plan?

A: Schools need to identify their key constituents internally and externally. Schools also need to have multiple mechanisms in place for communicating. They need mass parent-notification systems, but they should also update a Web site and PA announcements. Some schools are also looking at social networking.

The key is to have multiple mechanisms for communicating during a crisis because people get information from different sources. Schools also need to have consistency with messages across different platforms, and there should be someone responsible for writing and approving messages.

Q: The 10-year anniversary of the Columbine shooting was this year. Has security improved since that tragedy?

A: Schools have a more heightened sense of awareness since the pre-Columbine era.

The progress momentum during the first couple of years after Columbine was pretty strong.

However, that momentum has stalled and is moving backward for several reasons.

School safety officials are struggling against a shortage of time and money, and in many cases, they are losing on both counts.

There is de-creased federal and state grants and funding for school safety. Reduced school budgets and funding for academics compete with school safety funding, and there is also a competition for time.

There is so much pressure on school administrators to improve test scores that there is a continuously decreasing amount of time for the delivery of prevention programs for students, counseling, mental health support, professional training for staff and other safety strategies.

There is also less time for school crisis teams to do the nuts-and-bolts legwork and train for their crisis plans.

Schools are certainly safer and doing more than the pre-Columbine era, but there are some very serious challenges, obstacles and impediments that are prohibiting schools from being as far advanced as they should be.

Q: Can schools make security improvements without a big financial and time investment?

A: A lot of the things that need to be done require more time than they do money. School safety has to be a leadership issue and a priority for the superintendent down to the building principal in order for it to filter down to teachers, support staff and the school community.

There has to be determination by leaders and a philosophy that it is not an issue of school safety versus academics. School security and academics need to go hand in hand.

School boards and school administrators have to stop looking at school security as a grant-funded luxury. Schools need to include at least some reasonable security expenses into their operating budget, depending on the school district and school within that district.

It’s amazing how often school districts have no line items or any funding for school security or professional training. That’s not going to be acceptable in the eyes of parents, the media and potentially a judge or a jury when schools get sued for negligence after an incident.

Q: What do you see for the future of school security?

A: Unfortunately, at least in the short term, there are not a lot of indicators of significant change in terms or reducing the trends of budget and time shortages. In fact, in his 2010 budget, the president has called for a net reduction of $184 million in school safety funding.

As we sit 10 years after Columbine, it’s amazing that the president and Congress are not reversing the trend of the last 10 years that continually cut school safety funding.

Until we see school safety back on the agenda in rhetoric and funding, we are not going to see those trends reversed. There is a gross lack of leadership at the state and federal levels.

The bright spots are going to have to occur at the local level. It’s up to local school boards, superintendents, building principals and others at the front line to exercise leadership and take a proactive approach.

National School Safety and Security Services

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