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Edward Lee McClain High School in Greenfield, Ohio, received a National Honor Award from the National Trust for Historic Preservation in 2002 for an extraordinary renovation that preserved its rich array of artwork while meeting all state programmatic guidelines and cost parameters. Photo courtesy of Triad Architects     Across the nation, we are finally investing in school facilities to support high-quality education, and it is long overdue. But too often, this has meant unnecessarily abandoning and demolishing older and historic schools. Now, through an extraordinary partnership of several organizations and the enlightened leadership of school facility planners, new guidelines for school construction will reflect current thinking about the values our older schools represent. Older and historic schools are generally small schools, with nurturing characteristics that reinforce self-esteem and encourage individual development. They are within walking distance of many students and their families, in neighborhoods where they have long served as centers of community. Their presence— especially when renovated—reinforces real estate values in a neighborhood and avoids the disinvestment cycle that erodes neighborhoods and the tax base. Even if they look dilapidated, these schools are usually structurally sound because they were built to last, and their substantial interstitial space makes it easy to update them with new mechanical, electrical, and communications systems. Renovated older and historic schools offer high-quality environments with large windows, wood floors, superior finishes, and often, handsome architecture and integrated artwork not affordable in new construction today. All that and more is available at no more cost, and often, far less cost, than new construction. Additionally, older and historic schools offer a cultural continuum that binds generations together through a common experience of place—a benefit hard to quantify but of real value in our fractured society. The Big School Boom For 30 years, however, public policies encouraged the demolition of older and historic schools and the consolidation of neighborhood schools into large campuses at the edge of town. Through such policies, we disengaged the school from the community, physically and culturally, to the detriment of each. Why? Because we were following a path set out in the years following WWII and never stopped to look back—or forward—for that matter. Consider that: In a 1952 article in American School and University magazine, Henry Linn, a professor of education at Columbia University, suggested it is “questionable” to modernize an older school if the cost is more than 50 percent of the cost of its replacement. Linn cited no source and offered no supporting evidence. Unchallenged, Linn’s opinion was cited repeatedly until it became legend, and then law, as some state departments of education adopted “percentage rules” that prescribe replacement as the preferred—if not required—option. The arbitrariness of such rules is demonstrated by the fact that the percentage adopted ranges from 50 percent to 90 percent in various states. In 1958, James Bryant Conant, president of Harvard University, published The American High School Today, extolling the virtue of larger schools. At a time when the average school had 127 students, he suggested high schools of 400-500 students would be better and would generate the economies of scale necessary to support technical education competitive with the Soviet challenge. We adopted the concepts of size and efficiency but failed to note limits on the scalability of those concepts. If bigger is better, we seemed to say, then huge must be great. School size escalated steadily, until many high schools today exceed 1,500 students, and newer schools are being designed for as many as 4,000. The unchecked opinions of these two influential authors were codified in guidelines published in the 1970s by the Council of Educational Facility Planners, International (CEFPI), an association of educational academics and school planners. CEFPI’s guidelines, like Linn and Conant, simply reflected their times. As Americans left the city for suburbia, school boards struggled to meet the demand for school facilities at the edge of town. Pouring their funds into new schools, they let the maintenance of older schools slip. But budgets never allowed replacing those schools, as enrollments burgeoned and the public’s willingness to support school levies crashed in one economic crisis after another. The consequence was a huge backlog of deferred maintenance and schools so deficient they could not support an Information Age education. Cities Come Back to Life When the public finally was ready to support a new investment in school facilities in the late 1990s, long-held myths about older schools convinced everyone that old schools had to go. But baby boomers who have grown up to appreciate historic neighborhoods and landmarks are bringing our cities back to life. Today’s smart growth and sustainable development movements are the offspring of the preservation and environmental movements that changed America. Preservation is widely understood to be the antidote to sprawl and the ultimate sustainable building practice. Today we increasingly recognize the benefits of smaller learning environments. We struggle to pass on traditional family values once taken for granted and seek stabilizing elements of community once anchored by neighborhood schools. Unfortunately, we continued to abandon and demolish older and historic schools, often replacing them with characterless mega-schools on remote sites. School after historic school was demolished without a thought. Although preservationists repeatedly demonstrated the ability of older and historic property of all kinds to be renewed, educators still associated old buildings only with misery, and state and district policies still were laden with institutionalized prejudice against renovation. In response, the National Trust for Historic Preservation listed historic neighborhood schools on its list of “America’s Eleven Most Endangered Historic Places in 2000” and launched a Historic Neighborhood Schools Initiative that included four strategies: Supporters of the initiative produced Why Johnny Can’t Walk to School: Historic Neighborhood Schools in the Age of Sprawl, a report highlighting school policies that encourage “sprawl schools” at the edge of town. That seminal document attracted support from smart growth and school reform advocates who saw the link between livable communities and better education. These supporters produced a series of case studies of successful school renovations around the nation. The idea was to demonstrate that renovation of older schools could, with the creativity of an experienced architect, provide state-of-the-art educational facilities while also preserving the essential character of an older or historic school. Currently, the National Trust has more than 30 detailed success stories on its Web site (www.nationaltrust.org). They urged local preservation organizations to get involved in school planning; encouraged them to undertake supportive documentation and studies that can constructively guide school facility decision makers; and prepared a series of tools to help them make the case to school officials and the general public. They began to track state school policies across the nation, flagging prejudice against renovation, and developed model state policies drawn from the work of progressive states, such as North Carolina and Maryland, whose policies actually discourage new construction and encourage renovation as the preferred option. Unfriendly Policies The demolition of Normal High School in Normal, Ill., illustrates the prejudice against older and historic school buildings that eats away at our educational heritage and unnecessarily costs society money. Photo courtesy of the Illinois Historic Preservation Agency     In some states, however, school facilities policies and regulations are unfriendly to the preservation ethic. For example, regulations issued by the Ohio School Facilities Commission governing a massive $23-billion building program contained all five of the most deadly practices affecting older schools and their communities: Minimum school size requirements that arbitrarily kill off a school in a small rural town or struggling urban neighborhood, leading almost inevitably to the decline of the community itself. Harsh evaluation standards that appraise existing schools against arbitrary suburban standards, making older and historic schools inherently deficient. Unfair costing formulas that ignore certain costs of new construction, such as site acquisition or infrastructure extensions to new schools. Minimum acreage requirements that force school districts to build at the edge of town. Percentage rules that establish an arbitrary level of cost, which precludes renovation. (Until recently, Ohio’s rule required that any renovation estimated to exceed two-thirds of the cost of new construction would be disallowed, forcing the district to build a new school.) Such rules require districts to spend more to get less and drive up the cost to both the state and the local district by as much as 33 percent. By direct dialogue with state leaders about such policies, the National Trust has encouraged several states to eliminate such wasteful practices—or at least temper their guidelines to offer more flexibility. A New Approach National Clearinghouse for Educational Facilities— An annotated and linked bibliography for emerging school facility issues. www.edfacilities.org National Trust for Historic Preservation— Links to resources of the organization’s School Initiative. www.nationaltrust.org /issues/schools/ Council of Educational Facility Planners, International— See the Publications page for new publications guiding school design relative to older and historic schools. www.cefpi.org     Because most jurisdictions formulated their facility policies on the basis of CEFPI’s 1970s guidelines, the Trust approached CEFPI, along with partner groups, including Smart Growth America, the Environmental Protection Agency, and the National Park Service. CEFPI officials were already in the process of reconsidering the guidelines to better reflect evolution in educational philosophy, so they agreed to consider preservation and smart growth issues as well. With input and advice from a variety of partner organizations, CEFPI has rewritten its recommendations in four new publications that will eventually reshape the process of school construction: Creating Connections: The Council of Educational Facility Planners' Guide to Educational Facility Planning, replaces the old Guide for Planning Educational Facilities, which was the bible for school planning for the last quarter of the 20th century. This new guide significantly expands recommendations for community input and participatory planning and erases pejorative attitudes about older buildings. A new Appraisal Guide for Older and Historic Schools will balance an existing evaluation tool that tended to make all older schools appear unresponsive to contemporary education. This new document will provide a framework for a far more objective dialogue on the value of existing schools. Schools for Successful Communities: An Element of Smart Growth summarizes new recommendations regarding the way schools fit into communities. It eliminates arbitrary acreage standards and presents several case studies that demonstrate the applicability of these new ideas. A Planning Guide to the Renovation of Older and Historic Schools is a new publication intended to help balance the decision making between renovation and replacement. It directly dispels the myths about school renovation and offers advice on how to avoid real pitfalls. Again, a series of specific case studies illustrate the potential of older schools. Preservationists recognize that not all old buildings can—or should—be saved. All they ask is a level playing field that allows older and historic schools to compete, to demonstrate their potential without prejudice. The new CEFPI guidelines will provide that balanced view—but only if school boards make the effort to become familiar with these new recommendations before making critical school decisions. Royce A. Yeater, AIA, is an architect with 30 years of experience in school planning and design and in the education of school administrators in that field. Since 2001, he has served as the midwest director of the National Trust for Historic Preservation, where he supports preservation activities in eight states from offices in Chicago. He can be reached at royce_yeater@nthp.org.