The nation’s historic schools are in the news again.  Senators Jim Webb (D-VA) and Mark Warner (D-VA) today introduced this new bill to provide tax credits for communities to partner with private sector developers to rehabilitate the nation’s older school buildings.  By combining the “Fix America’s Schools Today” program, the EPA School Siting Guidelines and the Rehabilitation of Historic Schools Act of 2011, renovating our existing schools really makes economic and environmental sense.

EPA – School Siting Guidelines

Based on research and public comment over the last four years, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) released voluntary guidelines to help local school districts and communities make the best school location decisions on October 2, 2011.  The information provided in this publication supports the idea that the renovation of existing neighborhood schools should be extensively investigated before the construction of new consolidated buildings located on the edges of a communities.  To learn more about these new guidelines download the report from the link above and/or register for the following webinars Safe Routes – Location, Location, Location: New Guidance for Locating Schools in a Healthy, Sustainable Way or NTHP – Live Chat: School Siting and Community-Centered Schools.

Sen. Sherrod Brown, Rep. Rosa DeLauro Announce Bill to Create Jobs Through Renovation of Schools 

What a great opportunity!  Let’s hope this goes through and many existing neighborhood schools and unemployed workers across the United States will benefit.

Ohio’s historic schools are being lost at an extremely alarming rate.  Since 1997, many rural and community centered schools have been unnecessarily demolished or abandoned.  Old Ohio Schools provides the proof.

Ohio School Facilities Commission

In 1997, the Ohio School Facilities Commission (OSFC) was created to address the growing issues with Ohio school building conditions.  Issues that were increasing exponentially because of local district deferred maintenance plans.  According to the OSFC website, “the Ohio School Facilities Commission (OSFC) administers the state’s comprehensive Kindergarten through 12th Grade public school construction program.  The agency helps school districts fund, plan, design, and build or renovate schools”.  The OSFC coordinates facility assessments on all of Ohio’s school facilities.  These assessments are then provided to each school district for review and are used to help the districts create a Master Facility Plan and determine the future of existing facilities.  How Does The Funding Work? explains how the OSFC will co-fund a district’s project based on a yearly eligibility ranking list compiled by the Ohio Department of Education.  Overall this program is truly beneficial to Ohio’s educational system, but there are some concerns.

During the initial years of the OSFC, a “2/3rd’s Rule” was created to determine if a building was to be renovated or replaced with a new school.  If the cost to renovate an existing school was over two-thirds the cost to build an equally sized new building, then the OSFC would say the facility was to be replaced.   The OSFC has since changed the “rule” to be more of a “guideline” and will now co-fund the cost of renovation up to 100% of the cost of an equally sized new building.  The OSFC staff and consultants will not actively promote this option and it is up to those interested in renovation, within the local community, to advocate for a more in depth cost analysis for historic schools.  If the local district’s facility assessment for renovation costs are greater than 2/3rd’s the cost of an equally sized new building and the district chooses to renovate the existing building, then a waiver needs to be submitted to the OSFC for approval.

If a school district decides to abandon their existing school facility/facilities, the OSFC will even co-fund abatement and demolition costs.  Even if adaptive re-use is a possible option, most abandoned schools have been razed and many of the properties are now empty lots.

All records of the OSFC are public, as defined within the Public Records Policy, unless they are specifically exempt from disclosure under the Ohio Revised Code.  Anyone can make a records request by using the OSFC Media Contact found here.

Twenty-first Century Education

While not all facilities are candidates for continued educational use, many schools could be remodeled and upgraded.  The National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities (NCEF) published document, Historic Neighborhood Schools Deliver 21st Century Educations, provides the proof that “well-renovated, well-maintained historic schools can support a first-class twenty-first century education”.

Another important OSFC program caveat local districts and communities need to be aware of is the co-funding of technology.  The OSFC will only co-fund the technology infrastructure for a project, which includes the networking cable system, networking devices (routers, switches, wireless access) and shared servers (file, mail, web).  Unfortunately, individual computer systems (desktops/laptops) are not co-funded.  If a local district chooses to upgrade these items, it would be a 100% locally funded initiative (LFI).  LFI examples include, individual classroom computers, teacher laptops and devices located within a shared computer lab environment.

Feasibility Study

The only accurate method to determine the condition and future usability of an older or historic school is to conduct a feasibility study by an architect, engineer or design professional that has experience with this type of facility.  The document Renovation vs. Replacement & the Role of A Feasibility Study provides more details.  After completing the proper studies, many school districts even find it less expensive and a better overall value to renovate existing buildings than build new schools.  In most cases, schools constructed prior to the 1950′s were built to last indefinitely.  These buildings did not have projected lifespans, while newly constructed schools are built to only last an estimated 35-40 years.  By reusing an existing building envelope (foundation, walls, roof), total project costs can also be between 25%-40% less than building new.

Schools located in the center of town provide students with a tangible connection to the greater community.  Across the country, the trend has been to abandon older, walkable schools in favor of a consolidated “educational campus,” usually closer to the edge of town.  This practice has been shown to be detrimental to children’s health and welfare.  Schools are not isolated from the communities that they serve.  Now more than ever, children need to feel connected to the social continuum of past and future generations.

The recently published report from the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Renee Kuhlman (Director, Special Projects; Center for State and Local Policy), “Helping Johnny Walk to School“, outlines the many consequences of abandoning/demolishing existing neighborhood schools for new “mega” schools located on the outskirts of a community.  State-level policies enforcing minimum site requirements and negative biases toward renovation within funding formulas are some of the main reasons why established historic schools are being lost.  Ohio is a prime example of one state that invokes educational facility policies.  Most importantly, the report provides conclusive evidence that “neighborhood schools” are more beneficial than the alternative for both the students and the community.

Consequences

The “greenest” building is the one already built.  Renovation of existing buildings can be considered one of the single most important contributors towards sustainable architecture and building design.  Every building has something called “embodied energy”, which is the total amount of energy used to produce the materials and construct the structure.  The embodied energy unit of measurement, the British Thermal Unit (BTU), is not very telling, but it can be converted into a more understandable format; like number of recycled aluminum cans, gallons of gasoline or barrels of oil.

The amount of embodied energy within an existing 100,000 sq./ft. school, the energy used for the demolition of the existing school and the energy used to construct a new equally sized facility would be equivalent to the misuse of one or a combination of the following items:

- 2,427,826 gallons of gasoline

- 224,476,800,000 recycled aluminum cans

- 34,900,000 barrels of oil

* environmental costs were calculated at TheGreenestBuilding and are only estimates

Given the chance to utilize existing buildings is about doing what’s right for our communities, our children and their future.  It’s part of what students are being taught in school everyday, for them, it has become a way of life.

This site was created to show the residents of Ohio, that with the right plan, their schools can be updated to allow many more years of academic use.

“The truth is that in numerous cases, older school buildings can be renovated to 21st century standards with everything we’d expect in a new school.”

- Royce Yeater, school facilities architect and head of the National Trust for Historic Preservation’s Midwest office

* pictures compliments and property of www.oldohioschools.com

* pictures compliments and property of www.oldohioschools.com

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The Advantage Ohio public-private working group formed to analyze the school construction and renovation process had twelve members: three from state government, three from local school districts, two from non-profit groups, and four from the private sector. Below is one of the recommendations:

Enhance renovation viability — Give equal consideration to building replacement and building renovation, while allowing flexibility to replace buildings that are educationally unsuitable even if cheaper to renovate. Establish contingency-funding guidelines for renovation projects based upon actual project cost data to address renovation’s need for greater contingency funding than new construction.

In the past the Ohio School Facilities Commission promoted new construction over renovation. The “Two-Thirds” guideline was used to support their position. This guideline is listed below:

When the cost of renovating a school building exceeds two-thirds of the cost of replacing the building, the policy of the Commission will be to replace the building. However, the Commission retains the ability to approve renovations that cost in excess of two-thirds of the cost of replacing the building if it is demonstrated to the Commission that the building has special historical value, or for other good cause shown. The Commission will co-fund renovations in excess of two-thirds of the cost of replacement, up to the cost of new construction. Expenditures exceeding the cost of a new building will be the responsibility of the school district.

The OSFC can recommend that a building be replaced if the cost exceeds two-thirds, but this is only a guideline. A waiver can be submitted to and approved by the OSFC, which could allow co-funding up to the cost of an equally sized new building.

The OSFC has also published an OSFC Renovation Brochure. There are six questions posed to help determine if a facility should be considered for renovation.

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Historic Neighborhood Schools Deliver 21st Century Educations

Many people equate old schools with substandard schools, but as hundreds of school districts throughout the United States have shown, well-renovated, well-maintained historic schools can support a first-class twenty-first century educational program. Moreover, such schools often provide features lacking in newer schools, such as inspiring architecture, grand auditoriums, large windows, and meticulous craftsmanship.

The generally smaller size of historic neighborhood schools often means more personal attention for students—something most educators favor and extensive research supports. Their small scale can help them be safer and more secure and also lets them fit gracefully into residential neighborhoods. This “easy fit” facilitates greater involvement by parents and residents in the school and can make communities more amenable to passing future bond issues. The proximity of these schools to established residential neighborhoods, coupled with the typically pedestrian friendly layout of the neighborhoods themselves, means more students can walk or bike to school. Thus states and school districts can save on student transportation costs and invest more heavily in programs that foster student learning.

Recent renovations of historic schools in Spokane, Washington; San Antonio, Texas; and Boise,Idaho, illustrate these points and challenge the notion that well renovated historic schools cannot meet modern standards. This article recounts the stories of these schools and concludes with several briefer examples that show how communities have found creative solutions to common problems.

A few additional examples of school renovations, noted below, illustrate how school districts, architects, planners, and others have creatively addressed different barriers, including such widespread problems as:

• unfamiliarity with techniques for bringing older structures up to modern codes;
• funding biases that favor new construction over renovation;
• daunting acreage requirements for schools; and
• the notion that a new building is inherently better than an old one.

Funding Biases
A policy in Ohio of withholding state funds from school renovation projects that cost more than two-thirds of the expense of a new school discouraged school districts from updating historic schools. But in Greenfield, Ohio, residents worked with Triad Architects of Columbus to have the rule waived to permit renovating the historic Edward Lee McClain High School. This school, built in the Georgian Revival style, was created in 1914 by Edward McClain, whose modest family circumstances required him to work in his father’s harness shop as a young man. There he invented a detachable horse-collar pad that eventually made him rich—rich enough to finance the school’s construction and outfit it with works of art. The school, with its renovation completed in 2001, still enjoys decorative tiles at the drinking fountains, a courtyard flanked by pillars and fountains, marble sculptures, and an art gallery of 165 masterpieces.

In a move toward better stewardship of existing schools, Pennsylvania eliminated its “sixty-percent rule,” which, as with Ohio’s “two-thirds rule,” once favored new construction over the renovation of existing schools. Controversy surrounding the Pennsylvania rule boiled over in 1994 soon after residents of Brentwood, Pennsylvania, learned it would mean losing two beloved elementary schools. In protest, the Concerned Citizens of Brentwood Borough worked with Preservation Pennsylvania, Inc., to persuade the state department of education to change the rules. In 1998, the state not only rescinded the 60 percent rule but also modified its policy against funding the renovation of any school built with wood-frame construction. So long as such schools pose no increased safety risk, they are permitted. Brentwood’s historic Moore Elementary School now has been renovated and continues to serve the neighborhood it has anchored since 1923.

Acreage Requirements
Though well-intentioned, acreage requirements often force school districts into two bad choices: either destroy the neighborhood they are trying to educate or build “sprawl schools” on remote sites to which few children can walk. Such requirements threatened the historic Logan Elementary School in Columbia, South Carolina, in the mid-1990s because the school, which occupies only four acres, could not meet the state’s edict requiring seven acres for elementary schools. But after the school district obtained a waiver from the acreage requirements, the Boudreaux Group, a local architectural firm, completed a $7.9 million renovation in 1999. The project has not only solved space, technology, and building code issues, but has also improved neighborhood property values, once on the decline, and encouraged reinvestment in the area.

Magnets for Sprawl or Anchors For Civic Life?
Not every valued or historic school can or should be renovated. But too many schools are casually condemned by biases that favor new construction, by school facility assessments that reflect little expertise in the rehabilitation of older buildings, and by ignorance of basic techniques for helping older buildings meet modern codes and program requirements. In early 2002, the historic Kirk Middle School in East Cleveland, Ohio, became a casualty for these very reasons. One of the city’s most distinguished landmarks, the school was demolished and carted off to the landfill without so much as a serious evaluation of the school’s potential for renovation.

Too often, ADA, fire safety, and other important requirements are used as an excuse to demolish a valued school when in fact these requirements frequently can be met at a reasonable cost. Too often, smaller, community-centered schools that have held neighborhoods together for decades are destroyed without competent evaluations of their potential for continued use through modernization.

Lakis Polycarpou, a young graduate of Columbine High School in Colorado, strikes home when he writes:

Of course we will always need some new schools. But we have a choice in how we build them. Will they carry a sense of permanence, dignity, respect for education and the public life? Or will they be interchangeable and disposable? Will they be built as the center of a community—an anchor for civic life—or will they be put on the outskirts of town as magnets for sprawl?

The choice is not merely between the old and the new—it is between the dignified and the undistinguished—the enduring and the disposable. It is a choice between thoughtless replication of sprawl and the conscious decision to invest in civic life.

About the Author
Constance Beaumont is director for state and local policy at the National Trust for Historic Preservation and author of Why Johnny Can’t Walk to School: Historic Neighborhood Schools in the Age of Sprawl.

 

“Many older schools, designed so that students could walk to school, provide small, personal educational settings – reflecting a style of education whose value has only recently been rediscovered by teachers, parents, and community leaders. To abandon or demolish such property without a thorough and creative look at their potential to continue to support twenty-first century educational programs is a waste of valuable community assets.” 

- Council of Educational Facility Planners International (CEFPI)

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This neighborhood school was demolished the last week of February, 2010.

Built: 1915-1916

Retired: 2007

Photo credit: Bill Breedon

Photo credit: Bill Breedon

Photo credit: Bill Breedon

According to a Hudson BOE press release:

The sandstone plaques and some bricks were salvaged for future use.

The 2.1 acres will become green space and a community park, if affordable.

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To find the correct answer, the school board sent out requests for proposals for renovation feasibility studies to dozens of architectural and construction firms. Twenty-four firms responded. But most asserted an odd proviso — as long as the board guaranteed that their company would receive the design contract, the company would provide the evaluation for free. And when the district superintendent, Tom Smith, replied that the district would prefer to pay for the study, two-thirds of the firms walked away.

As it turns out, not only is this scenario actually quite common, it’s a key reason why so many school boards decide to build new facilities rather than renovate old ones. The truth is, schools that use free evaluations too often only get what they pay for.

Indeed, Escanaba’s experience raises serious questions about the no-cost evaluations that so many communities use to help them decide what to do with older buildings. Since the companies are covering their own expenses for their evaluation, it’s difficult for them to spend a lot of time evaluating an old building’s structural, mechanical, electrical, and environmental issues. And when it’s time to estimate renovation costs, it behooves these same companies to present worst-case scenarios that protect them if they actually do land a restoration job instead of the much more predictable construction project.

The result, some school officials say, is that consulting companies provide inordinately high estimates for renovation; districts then decide it is better to simply build a new facility.

A Closer Look Favors Renovation
Fortunately for Escanaba, Mr. Smith decided to pay for the evaluation and hired the Kalamazoo-based Diekema-Hamann Architects, Inc., which, the superintendent said, submitted one of the most thorough proposals for building analysis the board received. To the board’s surprise, the firm concluded that renovating the old school would cost about the same as building a new one — approximately $7 million.

At this point, the school board was leaning towards building a new school, figuring that would be the wiser investment. Most consultants would stop right there and recommend a new school.

But as word of the school board’s intent to build instead of renovate made its way around Escanaba, it prompted a strong, quite different reaction from homeowners who lived by the old school.

“We couldn’t see losing the middle school to a new school,” said Gilbert Cheeves, an engineer who owns the Marina Company in town, lives near the school, and helped lead the renovation campaign. “It’s a magnificent building.”

Mr. Cheeves and his colleagues collected 1,600 petition signatures favoring renovation and presented them to the school board in 2000. Mr. Smith and the school board responded by agreeing to Mr. Cheeves’ request for eight public meetings on the question. Mr. Cheeves became very involved in the process, repeatedly asking participants, “What is important to you and what can you compromise on?”

Pro-renovation citizens rallied around an unexpected piece of information provided by Norm Hamann, Diekema-Hamann’s prime architect for the evaluation. He pointed out that, even if renovating cost the same as building new, renovation provided a much better value.

“We thought it was useful to answer the question of how much it would cost to duplicate the current junior high school, not just build a new one,” Mr. Hamann said. He explained at community meetings that the old school had assets that just couldn’t be replicated in a new facility. The old school, in fact, boasted a 750-seat auditorium rivaling any theatre in Michigan, plus rock-solid construction and classic 1930s brick and masonry architectural treatments. That’s why, he said, “when we concluded our analysis, [we found] that it would cost $12 million to build the same school — the renovated school would be worth $5 million more than a new school built outside of town.”

The school board’s scientific survey of the community’s views on renovation and new construction found an even split. Basing their choice on gut instinct and a heightened awareness of the community’s feelings, the superintendent recommended and the board approved a bond proposal for renovating the existing school. It passed by a resounding 24 percentage points.

Converts to the Cause
The project had its skeptics.

“I just couldn’t see how this dark, musty building could be anything else,” said Bob Koski, the junior high school principal who had lived with the old building for 11 years and survived the mess, racket, and inconvenience of renovation. According to Mr. Hamann, Principal Koski had his arms crossed throughout their first conversation and insisted that he’d rather have a new school. But, according to the architect, Mr. Koski has now become a firm believer in renovation.

“After the possibilities became apparent, he has been the best client we’ve ever worked with, involved and supportive every step of the way,” Mr. Hamann said of the principal.

Superintendent Smith said the process also taught him something: A school district must spend the money to look very carefully at the facts, rather than use a quick, “free” process when evaluating an old building. The more thorough the investigation, he said, the more likely it is that renovation makes more sense than building new.

Mr. Smith is backed up by something that is hard to argue with — the newly renovated Escanaba Junior High School. It opened this fall and is now a spectacular building with a new classroom wing and gymnasium and a wonderfully remodeled main wing with a new media center, music room, and shop. By fighting sprawl and saving taxpayer dollars, the revived school brightens downtown Escanaba’s future.

Architects pointed out that, even at the same price, renovation provided a significantly better value.

* Article taken from “Hard Lessons: Causes and Consequences of Michigan’s School Construction Boom, Published by the Michigan Land Use Institute

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Despite having distinct meanings, these words are often mistakenly used interchangeably. The following definitions are taken from the Old House Journal Guide to Restoration to help you differentiate between the terms.

- Preservation means keeping an existing building in its current state by a careful program of maintenance and repair.

- Rehabilitation means making a structure sound and usable again, without attempting to restore any particular period appearance. Rehabilitation respects the original architectural elements of a building and retains them whenever possible.

- Renovation is similar to rehabilitation, except that in renovation work there is a greater proportion of new materials and elements introduced into the building.

- Restoration is the repair or re-creation of the original architectural elements in a building so that it closely resembles the appearance it had at some previous point in time. As comparable with rehabilitation, restoration implies a more active approach to reproducing architectural features that may have been removed.

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This briefing is the result of a basic operational expense analysis for twenty-one Ohio schools that abandoned & demolished existing schools for new facilities.  The supporting data is available to the public from the Ohio Department of Education’s (ODE) website.

Ohio School Districts That Have Replaced Educational Facilities

Definition:

The Ohio Department of Education’s definition of “Expenditure Data”

Building Support:

Facilities and operations support includes facilities and operations at the building and central office levels. It is made up of multiple functions, which combine both capital goods (building, buses, heating equipment, etc.) and the resources necessary to operate, clean, repair and improve them. Purchasing for the Enterprise funds, the largest of which is the Lunchroom operation, is also included.

For example, Indian Valley LSD moved into their new facilities for the 2007-2008 school year.

Operational Expenses were:

- $2,880,095 for 2006-2007

- $4,309,766 for 2007-2008

- $4,030,956 for 2008-2009

Conclusion:

Based on these results and the expenditure data, do new educational facilities really reduce operational expenses for school districts?

Many districts that have participated in the Ohio School Facilities Commission program to build new educational facilities are now requesting to participate in the OSFC – School Energy Conservation Program.  Galion City School District, referenced in this analysis, just announced on August 27, 2010 they will be participating in the School Energy Conservation Program at a cost of $1.7 million.  Even after completing a new high school, middle school and two elementary schools for the 2007 – 2008 school year, annual operational expenses jumped from $2.6 million to $3.3 million.

Again, this is only a very basic analysis from the data that is uploaded to the Ohio Department of Education by the local school districts.  A more indepth study needs to be completed before the answer is truly known.

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Supporting data/charts:

Operational Expenses From 1997 – 2009

Enrollment Below 2000 Students – 1997 to 2009

Enrollment Above 2000 Students – 1997 to 2009

Enrollment Special Considerations – 1997 to 2009

*large reduction in  student enrollment