Maintain School District Sites Via Retrofitting.

For years, many school districts have lacked enough money to maintain their existing facilities adequately. Now, all districts face an additional challenge: the arrival of high-tech education that threatens existing school buildings with obsolescence.

What can cash-strapped school districts do?

* Face reality. Like any business, each school district must create a strategic plan that incorporates these realities into its day-to-day budget. In many ways, the need to maintain our schools works hand-in-glove with the need to upgrade these facilities. Therefore, the basic strategy for school districts is piggybacking, or incremental retrofitting.

If you have to patch and repaint plaster walls in a 1930s school, don't stop there. During this repair work, add conduits for future communications or upgrade your electrical wiring. If you don't plan for the future, you'll be building a 1930s school piece-by-piece all over again, on the eve of the 21st century.

* Develop a facilities assessment and technological master plan.

Although incremental retrofitting is your basic strategy, it must be based on an assessment of each school to determine what work needs to be done to maintain and upgrade that facility. With that information, you then can develop a technological master plan that sets your technological priorities and guidelines, not only for each school building but for the entire district.

At the most basic level, you want to plan a synergistic technological system. School funds typically come in bits and pieces. If you buy your technical equipment in bits and pieces without the coordination of a master plan, you probably will acquire incompatible systems that will cause problems in the future. But if you know where you want to go, you know what you need to get there, including what equipment to buy.

Bringing the two together--the facilities assessment and a technological master plan--maximizes the use of your typically limited funds, enabling you effectively to piggyback maintenance and upgrades, extending the life of your school facilities by decades.

Essential Elements

A strategic plan that accomplishes these ends requires the following four elements.

* Anticipate high-tech needs.

We know that our high-tech educational future will have some fundamental requirements, such as adequate electrical wiring, good lighting, and environmental controls for classroom computers and other equipment. Discuss with engineers and architects how these improvements can be addressed cost effectively and what repairs offer the best opportunities for their incorporation into the school. Schedule those repairs and that retrofitting into your strategic plan and budget.

Use government-mandated improvements--and funds when available--to piggyback maintenance work and high-tech upgrades.

Federal regulations and state mandates often are given to public schools. Handicap accessibility, special education, energy conservation--the range seems limitless. With strategy in hand, rather than viewing each mandate as yet another burden on time and resources, school districts can regard these calls for change as opportunities.

Use a mandated change or improvement to piggyback additional maintenance work and technological upgrades based on your technological master plan. Sometimes these government mandates come with government money: Do the work so these funds also can help to carry out your strategy and improve your schools for everyone, not just the mandated groups.

* Create flexible classroom layouts.

Today, the classroom must serve various educational philosophies: traditional teacher-stands-in-front-of-the-students method, clusters that enable students to work individually or in small groups, etc.

By altering furnishings and service access, the traditional classroom can be adapted to new philosophies and technologies. Replace old-fashioned desks with serviced mobile stations equipped with computers. Use partitions to separate work areas or open the whole room up to the full class. The possibilities are endless.

Think of the classroom as a stage that will host many plays. A flexible layout allows teachers and students to choose the options that work best for them at any given time.

* Design flexibility into other facilities

This approach does not necessarily mean designing one facility to serve multiple uses. Instead, more frequently it means designing one school facility to reach different students in many ways.

Create flexibility within that space and in how people work together. If a classroom has all its computer outlets around the perimeter--and no outlets in the center of the room--you are saying something about how that space will be used and not used, now and in the future.

Design flexibility gives students and classroom teachers alternatives. They get to choose how they want to work together.

In effect, design flexibility gives your school nine lives through options for different types of grouping, technologies, activities, etc., all of them based on your technological master plan and your overall strategic plan.

Ehrenkrantz & Eckstut, an architectural and planning firm, has received more than $8 million in foundation and institutional grants to develop new designs for educational facilities and related buildings.