Cultivating dialogue before building: two districts reaped community buy-in and financial support by centering on communication.

School construction, renovation and design projects can pose a dual challenge to district administrators and consultants who must meet the often-immediate demands for space while undertaking the sometimes time-consuming process of achieving community support.

Input and buy-in from the diverse constituencies such as parents, senior citizens, teachers and administrators are vital to the success of a school construction or renovation project, as is community involvement. But if not carefully managed, community involvement can also easily cause delays and budget overruns.

What is the best way to include the community in your district's construction and renovation projects? Two districts with very different needs discovered that the key is open communication and early involvement.

Discovery Phase

Before Burt Hill Kosar Rittelmann Associates begins design work with a school district, the architects participate in several weeks of discussions with everyone who has a stake in how the building will look and feel. This high-involvement, interactive approach, called discovery through viewpoint and diagram or DVD, solicits input from community members and allows them to air their concerns long before the intense design work begins.

During the DVD process, teachers, parents, neighbors, students and administrators are invited to a design command center to express their concerns, discuss project concepts, share their likes and dislikes about school buildings and evaluate the pros and cons of the project with the architect and engineers. Based on this feedback, the architects develop their initial rough line drawings into more detailed schematic drawings that show traffic patterns, relationships between spaces, efficiency of the project layout and conceptual sketches of the look of the building.

With these more detailed plans in hand, the architects spend the next six weeks establishing schedules, finalizing building dimensions and selecting materials. Once again, they elicit additional feedback during formal presentations to educators, students, parents and the community, which they incorporate into the final design documents.

If a budget referendum must be passed before construction can begin, the project is put on hold pending passage of the referendum. Because the community has been actively involved in the project through the DVD process, there is a greater chance of the referendum being passed. Once the funds are approved, the actual construction process gets under way.

Mount Lebanon Regroups

The Mount Lebanon School District in Pittsburgh, with about 5,600 students, used the DVD process to help them renovate and reconfigure their K-12 schools to accommodate increased student enrollment and maximize the use of existing school facilities.

Prior to reconfiguration, the school district had seven elementary buildings, one junior high school and one senior high school.

The district hired consultant Ken Brooks of Kenneth Brooks and Associates in Lexington, Ky., to work with school administrators, faculty and community to estimate future student enrollment, determine the most efficient and effective school configuration and develop several viable options. After approximately 18 months of diaglogue, the district reconfigured the schools into seven K-5 elementary schools, two middle schools and a single high school that would be located in the building that previously housed the combined middle and high schools.

Rather than build a new middle school, the district decided to renovate two existing elementary school buildings. The district worked with architects and engineers, who set up a command center in a room at the elementary school and remained on site for several weeks, meeting with administrators, teaches, parents and students.

The many people invited to be involved in the design process were excited about providing input.

"As a superintendent, you are only as wise as those around you let you be," Mount Lebanon's superintendent, Glen Smartschan, said. "My expertise is limited and my vision has some parameters. The value of input from constituent groups is not so much the specifications of how the building will be designed and used, but the engagement of hundred of people in discussion about what the building is going to become."

Smartschan added, "I'd prefer to have more input than I need and then make decisions. As a result of this dialogue, the school now emphasizes the cultural fabric of the district and the history of the buildings."

York County Unites

Steven Staples, division superintendent of the York County schools in Yorktown, Va., faced a very different challenge: creating a single campus that housed the 1,300-student middle school and 1,000-student high school separately but allowed the two schools to share the cafeteria, kitchen, library, gymnasium and auditorium.

The district chose this configuration to enhance curriculum between the middle and high school that would benefit the students and teachers at both levels. This design approach saved the district $5 million or approximately 25 percent of what the project would have cost if built separately.

Concerns about achieving the right balance of safety, separateness and unity led Staples to use a high-involvement DVD planning process that allowed all constituents to help determine the best solution. The input from everyone was well received, resulting in a first-class facility for a low project cost.

Ultimately, York County decided to build a school with three separate but connected wings. The middle school and high school are housed in separate wings that are each connected to the central commons through interior doors. The commons area is the hub of all shared activity. The entrances into the middle school and high school are located as far from one another as possible, thereby separating high school students from younger students and satisfying parental concerns about building safety.

"Instead of developing a design and then having folks say 'you forgot this or that,' we started by listening to the issues," Staples said. "You could see the product change from the early drawings to the building that we ultimately built. There were substantive changes along the way that resulted directly from those meetings. The solution we envisioned initially was not at all the one we ended up implementing, but it's a better solution than we could have imagined."

Expanded Horizons

The consensus-building DVD process has been overwhelmingly successful in both of these districts. The communities are supportive of the school building projects because the stakeholders had a voice in their construction. The DVD process also has greatly expanded the education and experience of the architects.

John Kosar is chairman of Burt Hill Kosar Rittelmann Associates, 400 Morgan Center, 101 East Diamond St., Butler, PA 16001. E-mail: [e-mail]