AVON LAKE, Ohio—The Avon Lake City Schools district is looking to enter into an agreement with design firm Fanning Howey for various upgrades to its schools. The architect had earlier performed work at the district’s Avon Lake High School.

According to the Chronicle of Elyria, the district is looking specifically at updating buildings at Learwood Middle School as well as several of the elementary schools under its purview. The district’s enrollment continues to increase, necessitating updating its various buildings. One of those upgrades is installing air conditioning units, which are needed during the stifling summer months encompassing the end of one school year and the commencement of the next.

According to the Chronicle, the district superintendent, Bob Scott, also pointed to other necessary projects including replacement of older boilers and reinforcing several roofs that have been exposed to weather.

Any plan conjured by Fanning Howey will need to go before the local board of education, who will then have to decide how said improvements to the school district would be funded. Meanwhile, a facilities planning committee has been meeting on several occasions to work with the architects on potential refurbishments district-wide, the Chronicle reported

Fanning Howey’s other education-related projects in the Buckeye State include Parkside Elementary and Riverview Elementary, which were the first schools in the state to achieve LEED version 4.0 certification.

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The hottest coffee shop in the city of Carmel, Ind., a suburban community just north of Indianapolis, isn’t located on Main Street or in a strip mall. It’s the Carmel Café & Market, a student-run coffee shop that is part of the DECA business program at Carmel High School. The renovation of the Carmel Café & Market, which was once a small spirit shop, is an excellent example of how to design for the needs of young entrepreneurs.

Treat Students as Owners

Student involvement in design is always important, but for entrepreneurial spaces, it is absolutely critical. Operational issues have a great impact on the design of a business space, and young entrepreneurs must learn to think through the impact of the built environment on efficiency and profit. At the Carmel Café & Market, the owners are the students, not the teachers, so their input was critical to the design process.

“This is not class where teachers run the business and students get credit for participating,” said Richard Reid, DECA advisor and IB Business Management teacher at Carmel High School. “This is truly a student-run business, so we made sure to use the design process as a learning opportunity.”

The design of the Carmel Café & Market renovations, completed in September 2017, involved multiple charrettes with students and their faculty advisors. Early sessions focused on operational issues and how the space would work. How will orders flow in and out? Where will customers queue up? How many back-of-house coffee stations do we need? How will customers exit? Students explored these issues and collaborated with architects and interior designers to find solutions. In addition to floor plans and renderings, students developed and reviewed flow patterns to create the optimum space for operations. Every aspect of the business received scrutiny, all the way down to the design of the frappe-making station.

Grace Marchese, a student at Carmel High School and director of operations for the Carmel Café & Market, was one of the stakeholders involved in the design charrettes.

“I learned how much thought goes into designing a space for a business,” Marchese said. “Every single detail matters, and it is these small details that build on one another to create the overall feel you want to have.”

The design team also worked with students to create signature spaces that reflect the Carmel Café & Market brand. Students reviewed design concepts and commented on branding, look and feel, efficiency and product placement. Based on student input, the design team added items such as a performance stage for student singers and musicians.

The collaborative process involving students not only resulted in a better design, but it also gave these young entrepreneurs a valuable experience in creating space for their own business.

Be Nimble

While the Carmel Café & Market is currently a coffee shop, the students and design team specifically focused on creating a flexible business lab that could serve multiple needs. This flexibility is crucial to allow students to respond to different market forces and to change their business model over time.

“Students can rearrange the space to improve operations and the customer experience,” said Reid. “And if they decide one day that their business model should change, the facility will accommodate a new kind of business.”

Some restaurant-related equipment is included in the design; however, the Carmel Café & Market is broken down into core spaces focused on teaching broad entrepreneurial skills. Flexible furniture allows students to be creative in how they arrange and rearrange space. A nearby marketing lab provides a board room–type setting for leadership and critical thinking. Presentation space and interactive technology tools give students the ability to engage in problem solving, teamwork and communications.

To read the entire article, check out the November/December issue of School Construction News.

Andy Miller, AIA, is a project architect at Indianapolis-based Fanning Howey. Carla Remenschneider, RID, IIDA, is director of Interior Design at Fanning Howey.

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The British International School of Houston (BISH) has very strong personalized learning solutions. That’s why when the school decided to build a brand-new campus in Katy, Texas (located just west of Houston), this concept was woven into every design decision.

The curriculum and building itself are created entirely around the needs of the students and their learning, moving from a teacher-driven model to a learner-driven model. “For many years, schools have been built around the needs of the teachers,” said Andrew Derry, principal at BISH. “Teachers have their own room, with their own desk and their own white board, and students move from room to room as they get a year older or as they change subjects. At our campus, the learning environments are far more flexible than that and can change at a [moment’s notice] to suit the needs of the individual learners.”

At first, the teachers were silent when they were told that they wouldn’t have individual classrooms or desks, but they quickly started to embrace the building, Derry said.

The new 280,000-square-foot facility was designed to accommodate these new learning models; however, the school also needed to transfer from its previous northwest Houston facility because it was experiencing flooding, according to Van Martin, chairman and CEO of Tribble & Stephens Construction Ltd., the locally based general contractor on the project. The Indianapolis office of Fanning Howey served as architect of record through a joint venture with locally based House+Partners Architecture. Construction began in January 2015.

Completed in time for the 2016-17 school year, the facility serves as the North American flagship campus for Hong Kong-based Nord Anglia Education. It is an international school, particularly popular among expats living in Houston who are looking for the continuity of a British curriculum for their children.

More than 50 nationalities attend the school, with a majority of students being British, but students don’t have to be expats to attend. In fact, the school’s reputation is so strong that it’s considered a premiere private school in the Houston area, according to Dan Mader, AIA, ALEP, and principal at Fanning Howey. Its popularity was another reason for the new school, which increased the school’s capacity from 850 at its previous location to 2,000.

The BISH curriculum brings engagement and a broad range of programs for students from the very start of Pre-K through 12th grade. “The Early Years program is fairly unique for schools of this kind,” Mader said. “It’s integrated as a continuum of their curriculum — not just as a means to take care of Pre-K kids.”

The school particularly emphasizes a project-based learning approach to teaching science, technology, engineering, arts and math (STEAM). An ever-growing partnership with Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and The Juilliard School continue to redefine those methods of teaching and learning. Not only do teachers participate in workshops at MIT to get ideas for the curriculum, but students also get the opportunity to visit MIT to immerse themselves in a culture of hands-on problem-solving. Similarly, the school’s music program is curated by Juilliard and is designed around 12 categories for students to explore a wide variety of musical genres, styles and cultures.

Designing for the Curriculum

The school’s British curriculum — which relates more to a holistic view of the student, rather than a compartmentalized one — played a major role in the design, addressing two major themes: personalized learning and transparency.

“The main goal of the project was to design and build a genuine ‘school of the future,’” said Derry.

The entire facility is centralized around a four-story atrium that includes a second-floor university-level research commons called the Agora, surrounded by 16 flexible academic neighborhoods. From there, teachers are assigned to a neighborhood, and in that neighborhood, there are a variety of different types of furniture and learning areas that can be customized to the needs of the students learning in that neighborhood.

The school features a wide variety of spaces for project-based learning. A two-story science center features laboratories and student-centered forums. There’s a Design Technology Center with CAD lab studios, 3D printers, print media and laser-printing studios as well as three MIT-influenced Makerspaces.

“We work closely with MIT on our Design Thinking curriculum,” said Derry. “This includes elements of entrepreneurial challenges, coming up with new ideas, failing, rethinking, pivoting, failing and failing again. This is probably the biggest thing we have learned — the importance of failure and pivoting.”

The “arts” portion of the STEAM curriculum doesn’t disappoint either. Designed in collaboration with The Juilliard School, BISH’s Performing Arts Center features a theater, black-box theater, choral rooms, a dance studio, and keyboard- and strings-instrument laboratories. There is also an Aquatics Center with learn-to-swim and competition pools as well as extensive outdoor sports fields, including FIFA-regulation soccer pitches and a varsity stadium.

And all of this project-based learning is also put on display due to the requirement that 50 percent of the walls in the facility be entirely made of glass. “There was always a desire for transparency so that, as you’re in the building, people can see education taking place, and students see their peers engaged in learning from a motivational standpoint,” said Mader. “That’s a pretty strong attribute for a building to have.”

There are also academic wings that feature what the school calls “learning communities” — each with a variety of breakout areas that act as project-based learning centers in each academic core, according to Mader. Hand-held devices and high-tech equipment also encourage learning to occur anywhere throughout the building.

“There was very much a focus on flexibility and future proofing, knowing that if the school wants to be cutting edge from a technology perspective, administrators have to acknowledge that changes [will occur],” Mader said. “You have to build that in from a concept standpoint so that it’s easy to update and that the backbone and technology foundation is strong enough for whatever changes they will make in the future.”

Derry said that the students had the biggest impact on the design. “We worked with various groups of students on many areas of the school. As an example, we set a capstone project for a group of juniors,” Derry said. “They worked for a week in the summer in the offices of the architects who designed the building. We then gave them a budget and let them design a major part of the outside garden and farm. Some of those student now have places to study architecture at the university level.”

To read the entire article, check out the July/August issue of School Construction News.

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For Knapp, the plan involves building a 67,822-square-foot, two-story elementary school on an open space adjacent to the existing facility. The $14 million project will include a separate gym and cafeterias, as well as space for community activities in collaboration with the United Way of Racine County. Bray Architects of Milwaukee was selected to design the new school in January.

When construction begins on Olympia Brown Elementary, the school’s original location will be vacated and the school will shift to a different area in Caledonia. The $15 million school will span approximately 67,415-square-foot and will likely focus on STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) curriculum. Milwaukee-based Zimmerman Architectural Studios designed the facility.

The Gifford Elementary School addition, designed by Partners in Design of Kenosha, Wis., will be the largest of the three projects in terms of both size and total estimated cost. Gifford will require a $16.5 million budget with an extra $2.4 million to renovate the existing 85,000-square-foot elementary school. The middle school addition will comprise roughly 78,000 square feet, and the school, which will serve K-8 students upon completion, will remain open throughout construction.

The schools are anticipated to open in the fall of 2016 and will help improve educational offerings to district students. These projects will also create new community jobs.

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