What You Have What You Want What You Need

This is a case study exploring the development of a Long Range Educational Facilities Plan. The LREFP is a plan to enhance ACPS’ educational programs and services, accommodate a growing student population, and improve the mechanism for educational facilities planning in Alexandria. There are three steps in the process of creating a LREFP:

The first step, WHAT YOU WANT, is the development of Educational Specifications (Ed Specs). Ed Specs are both a blueprint and a benchmark for future school renovations and new construction projects. They prescribe how the built environment should support a school’s academic program. Ed Specs are primarily intended for use as a guide by architects and project planners, but the document also serves as a communication and bechmarking tool for all project stakeholders, including students, parents, families, faculty and administrators, and civic leaders and community members.

The second step, WHAT YOU HAVE, involves performing Facility Needs Analysis at each school. This step involves testing the capacity of the facility against the established Educational Specifications and projected enrollment growth, as well as benchmarking the existing facility against the ideal Ed Specs.

The third and final step is the Master Plan, or WHAT YOU NEED. The Master Plan is a graphic depiction of recommended renovations, additions, and new construction projects that adapt each school to the district’s expectation for collaborative, technologically-rich and flexible learning environments to support 21st century learning.

The Process

In 2013, the public school system in Alexandria, Virginia faced numerous pressures to its facility infrastructure. This Fragment documents the resultant Long Range Educational Facilities Plan, developed by the Design Team of Studio Twenty Seven Architecture, Brailsford & Dunlavey Program Management, and Public Pathways Educational Consultants.

In terms of student enrollment and the construction of new school buildings, the Alexandria City Public Schools system (ACPS) peaked in the 1970s. Over the next 35 years, student enrollment plummeted. Infrastructure was left largely dormant while school buildings built at peak enrollment were too big for the number of students they served. In the past decade, however, student enrollment has once again begun to grow. The capacity of ACPS’s school buildings is being tested. What’s more, the outdated facilities were designed for instructional models that are long out of use. ACPS needed a plan to transform its facilities into educational campuses capable of absorbing further enrollment growth and supporting modern ways of teaching and learning.

In order to move forward, ACPS needed to quantify these objectives. The school district engaged the Design Team to lead city and district representatives in the development of a Long Range Educational Facilities Plan (LREFP). In the process, the Design Team helped ACPS to update its Educational Specifications, WHAT YOU WANT, and assessed the condition and capacity of its current facilities against projected enrollment growth, WHAT YOU HAVE. The Design Team then developed a Master Plan, WHAT YOU NEED, that will guide ACPS as it expands and modernizes its schools.

The City

Alexandria, Virginia is a city located on the western bank of the Potomac River, a short distance from Washington, DC. In 2014, the City’s population comprised about 150,000 of the six million people living in the greater Washington Metropolitan Area.

Alexandria’s urban fabric varies from urban, historic neighborhoods adjacent to the Potomac River to more suburban single and multifamily developments to the west. The Alexandria City Public Schools Division consists of 18 educational campuses. This includes one high school spanning two campuses, three middle schools, and thirteen elementary schools. In 2014, Alexandria City Public Schools served 14,157 students. By 2020, enrollment in city schools is projected to grow by 16 percent. That enrollment is expected to grow another 14 percent by 2030.

Demographics

ACPS disproportionately serves minorities and households of a low socioeconomic status. In the 2010 Census, 61 percent of Alexandrians were white, 22 percent were African American, and 16 percent were Hispanic or Latino of any race. The ACPS student body is 27 percent white, 30 percent African American, and 36 percent Hispanic. Over a quarter of the city’s residents were born in a foreign country. ACPS records show that nearly 20 percent of its students receive English Language Learners services. ACPS students were born in 128 different countries and speak 103 native languages.

Although the median income of Alexandria’s residents is among the highest in the nation, socioeconomic diversity is especially apparent in the ACPS community. Approximately 60 percent of ACPS students are eligible for free or reduced lunch programs. In 2010, the districts in Alexandria with the lowest medium income were those residing in older apartment complexes along the 1-395 interstate highway.

District-wide Enrollment Trends

For the past half-century, population growth in Alexandria has been fueled by young adults moving to the Washington Metropolitan Area for new jobs. These individuals prioritized a convenient commute over the larger home size available in more remote suburbs. Residential development in response to this population demand was prevailingly multifamily and concentrated near transportation corridors and Washington Metropolitan Area Transit stations. In the years after 1960, the portion of single family households in the City increased to over 40 percent (more than 10 points higher than the national rate), and the City’s average household size fell to a percentage much lower than adjacent municipalities.

These trends had a significant effect on ACPS school enrollment. When young people that lived in Alexandria for its convenience chose to start families, they tended to move to remote suburbs with more affordable and larger “child-friendly” housing options. After peaking in 1970 at about 160 students per 1,000 residents; enrollment in Alexandria City Public Schools fell by 40 percent over the next 35 years. In 2007, there were just 77 students per 1,000 Alexandria residents.

This demographic paradigm began to shift during the economic recession that began in 2007. Before that year, it was relatively easy for families to relocate. The economic realities of the recession appear to have changed that dynamic. The fluctuation of the real estate market, job uncertainty, and rising gas prices have all discouraged families with school-aged children from moving. More children are being born in Alexandria and a higher percentage of these children are enrolling in ACPS kindergarten classes five years later.

Between 2000 and 2010, the number of children five years old and younger grew in Alexandria at more than twice the rate of the growth of the overall population. Since 2007, the kindergarten capture rate (the percentage of children born in Alexandria that enter kindergarten five years later) has risen by a third. The average cohort survival rate (the percentage of children that continue from one grade to the next) has risen by 4.5 percent.

Enrollment in Alexandria City Public Schools has risen thirty five percent since 2007. The fall 2014 enrollment of 14,847 students is the District’s largest since 1975. The engine of this enrollment growth is not attributed to new residential development. Rather, nearly all growth in enrollment since 2007 has generated from an increase in the number of students living in existing housing. Though much of this growth resulted from temporary economic conditions, most children now attending Alexandria Public Schools are expected to remain through high school graduation. Even with an improving economy, the urban fabric and location of Alexandria within the larger metropolitan region remains attractive to parents of a younger generation with changing attitudes toward sustainable living.

The city birthrate, the kindergarten capture rate, and cohort survival rates indicate that ACPS enrollment will continue to swell, outpacing the citywide growth rate at more than a three to one ratio.

As an important precursor to the LREFP, ACPS worked with city officials to project future enrollment for each school. In addition to localized demographic indicators, the forecasters analyzed plans for future development in each school zone. Single-family detached houses, townhomes, and garden apartments (housing types typical of areas zoned for low and medium residential density) currently generate students at a higher rate than mid and high density development. The planned high density, mixed-use redevelopments of garden apartments in the western districts will yield fewer students, while the conversion of commercial and industrial property to mixed-use development in eastern districts will generate more students.

By even the most conservative population growth estimates, all of Alexandria’s schools will be enrolled beyond their design capacity by 2020.

The purpose of educational specifications is to define the programmatic, functional, spatial, and environmental requirements of the educational facility, whether new or remodeled, in written and graphic form for review, clarification, and agreement as to scope of work and design requirements by the architect, engineer, and other professionals working on the building design.

The National School Boards Association

The first phase of the LREFP process in Alexandria was the development of new Educational Specifications (Ed Specs) for elementary and middle schools. Ed Specs tell the story of an ideal school facility. They are an illustration of how the built environment of a school will support the vision of its leaders. The Ed Specs address each activity, event, technology, and adjacency of the District’s envisioned curriculum. They are a single document that defines expectations amongst project stakeholders.

The Design Team started the Ed Spec process by guiding an ACPS committee through a series of brain-storming sessions. Together, we imagined the curriculum of the School of the Future, a model of learning for future generations of students. We challenged educators, administrators, and community members to clarify their expectations for the School of the Future’s built environment. These included expectations for academic and support spaces, facility operation, sustainability, architectural quality, and community integration. We then identified the gaps between these long term goals and current realities.

The Design Team also conducted several weeks of interviews with technical experts, building users, and other stakeholders. The spaces illustrated in the Ed Specs reflect input from specialists in information technology, facility planning, and education pedagogy.

We were careful to solicit community and student input at key intervals to ensure the Ed Specs considered diverse perspectives related to facility needs, adjacencies, and prioritizations. For example, a student focus group at George Washington Middle School illuminated the need for a diversity of environments to support alternative teaching methods and styles of learning.
The typical Ed Spec document is organized into three major sections: an Introduction, a summation of Overall Planning Concepts, and a detailed listing of Core Academic Space Requirements. The Introduction is a description of the ACPS School of the Future curriculum. It references national trends and standards for educational facilities planning, including discussion of technology in classrooms, the modern media center, the building as a learning tool, and evidence based design for environmental elements like light, air quality, acoustics, and furniture design.

The Overall Planning Concepts section includes a narrative summary of each program area and a discussion of conceptual building organization and overall design principles. This section outlines how the district’s philosophical requirements organize the learning environment and provide overarching guidance on critical design considerations such as program adjacencies, technology, health and safety, security, sustainability, environmental design and community use.

The Core Academic Space Requirements are based on a 700-student prototype for elementary schools and 1200-student prototype for middle schools. The enrollment capacity of a school is determined by class size, the number of core classrooms, and the efficiency of classroom use. The program quantity and square footage allotments for other areas of the building – the number of small group rooms, art and music labs, and support staff offices; the size of core areas such as the media center, dining and food services spaces, physical education facilities, and site amenities are sized based on the school’s core classroom enrollment capacity.

For each of the prototypes, the Ed Specs provide a detailed description of the size, quantity, and content of all required spaces. Spatial adjacency diagrams show how spaces should relate to one another both within and across program areas.

Typical floor plans illustrate the expectations for size, layout, furniture, and material usage in addition to technology and equipment requirements. Each diagram is accompanied by a description of the space’s square footage and capacity, associated ancillary spaces, spatial organization, program activities, environmental considerations, finishes, and plumbing.

Ed Specs are the primary evaluation metric of a successful Long Range Educational Facilities Plan. The document allows ACPS project planners to develop accurate project scopes and budgets. These are important steps in providing district leaders with the information required to make decisions about how to allocate resources.

What You Have

The second phase of the Alexandria LREFP process was the Facility Needs Analysis. Based on the dedicated square footage required for each student as established in the Ed Specs, the Design Team assessed each school and analyzed their capacity to serve projected enrollment growth. The assessments considered the square footage of core classrooms (by grade), specialty classrooms, shared spaces (including spaces that support Dining and Food Services, media centers, arts spaces, and gymnasiums); and support and administrative spaces (including health suites). The design team also conducted a physical and system conditions assessment of each facility.

The Design Team assigned a score of Very Inadequate to Excellent for each school in each of the following five categories:

Site: Assessment of the efficiency and conditions of site access, site circulation, and play areas/fields.

Building: Assessment of a building’s organization, its integrated technology and supporting infrastructure, and its accessibility.

Instructional and Support Spaces: Assessment of the size, internal organization, furnishings, equipment, lighting, acoustics, and air quality of classrooms (both core and specialty classrooms), support and administrative spaces, and shared spaces.

Utilization: Assessment of how efficiently the square footage of the school is used.

Security: Assessment of site lighting, intercommunication among spaces, and building surveillance.

All but two of Alexandria’s schools were built prior to 1980 and the average age of ACPS facilities is 58. The time and expense to keep these aging facilities in operation adds significantly to the school system’s annual expenditures. In addition, most of the schools have classrooms that are well under the size requirement dictated by the Ed Specs. Very Inadequate utilization scores were given to more than half the schools, indicating that much of the square footage in the existing schools is not allocated in a manner consistent with the demands of a modern curriculum.

School size, location and age

Facility Needs Recommendations

What You Need

The Facility Capacity Analysis revealed that nearly all of the 13 schools included in the LREFP require some level of reconfiguration or modernization. The Design Team determined that ACPS will, in total, be 23 elementary school classrooms and 12 middle school classrooms short by 2020. Without facility expansion, ACPS won’t have room for about 2,000 of the students it expects to be enrolled in five years. Three elementary schools and both middle schools are expected to surpass the maximum desired capacity as established in the Ed Specs, 850 students for elementary schools and 1,200 for middle schools, in the same amount of time.

In the Master Plan, the final phase of the LREFP, the Design Team proposed conceptual approaches to resolve the deficiencies identified in the Facility Needs Analysis. The plan suggests a degree of first, second, or long range priority and assigns an estimated cost for each project. The master plans are intended to be diagrammatic only, not prescriptive solutions.

The Master Plan represents one possible building solution that responds to enrollment growth and supports curriculum improvement at each of the 13 schools. It is intended as a guide for ACPS leadership to use in the development of the District’s Capital Improvement Program, its annual expenditure for the renovation and expansion of its school facilities.

A summary of the Master Plan component for each school is included on the following pages. The summaries consist of a city concept map, a more localized site plan, and an isometric drawing that illustrates the distribution of primary program elements.