The neighborhood school: an endangered species

As ever larger schools on the urban fringe replace historic institutions, a new report identifies public policy changes needed to save neighborhood schools. Why is only one in eight children walking or bicycling to school these days? Why do school districts routinely abandon older schools in walkable neighborhoods only to bus the children to large schools in suburban areas? The National Trust for Historic Preservation provides answers and suggests solutions in its recent report, Historic Neighborhood Schools in the Age of Sprawl: Why Johnny Can’t Walk to School. The report highlights the central role schools play in urban planning. Many of today’s auto-oriented schools are more than products of the dispersal of population and housing — they often become the vanguard for new development in agricultural areas, according to the report. Moreover, the National Trust cites examples from several states, showing that school districts often ignore or circumvent local planning laws. When revitalizing older neighborhoods, investment in existing schools can make a crucial difference. A neighborhood school is a place where both children and adults meet and is essential to maintaining a cohesive community, the report says. Bigger is not always better The National Trust faults public policies for undermining neighborhood schools and for ignoring opportunities to refurbish historic school buildings. One of the main culprits is national and local acreage standards, which make finding land for schools in established neighborhoods extremely difficult. Older schools are typically sited on two to eight acres, but the current national guidelines from the Council of Educational Facility Planners International recommend that an elementary school occupy at least 10 acres — a high school at least 30 acres — plus one acre for every hundred students. Some local guidelines call for up to 60 acres for high schools, and in Santa Fe, New Mexico, the school district requires parking spaces for 50 percent of the student body. For a school with 2,000 students, that would mean the addition of about seven acres of asphalt for parking lots, according to the report. When new schools are built in established neighborhoods, the acreage requirements may force the demolition of historic homes or the destruction of urban park land. Building multilevel schools would seem an obvious way to get around the land consumption dilemma. However, liability questions raised by the possibility of children falling down flights of stairs keep some school districts from choosing this option. State reimbursement policies also tend to favor new school construction. The so-called “60 percent rule” in effect in many states says that if renovation costs exceed 60 percent of the cost of building a new school, the school district will only get state funds if it builds a new school. The National Trust maintains that these arbitrary rules often do not factor in costs such as land acquisition and infrastructure extensions and neglect the schools’ function as neighborhood anchors. The cost of busing children great distances is also routinely ignored. In Maine, for example, the number of students dropped by 27,000 between 1970 and 1995, but the cost of school busing rose from $8.7 million to over $54 million (not adjusted for inflation), the report states. Advance scouts for sprawl From a land-use perspective, the greatest problem with the trend toward suburban “megaschools” is that they often establish development beachheads on agricultural land. Plans for new schools typically don’t face the high level of scrutiny and resistance that residential developments do, but once the schools and the infrastructure are in place, the door has been pushed open for additional development. The report quotes architect W. Cecil Steward of the University of Nebraska who contends that “the public school system... is the most influential planning entity, either public or private, promoting the prototypical sprawl pattern of American cities.” Building and rehabilitation codes are additional obstacles to school preservation. The National Trust argues that the cost of bringing old buildings up to code is frequently overestimated. In North Carolina, schools with wooden frames are automatically disqualified from receiving maintenance funds because they are considered unsafe. Progressive rehabilitation codes like the ones adopted in New Jersey and Maryland could improve the odds of survival for many neighborhood schools. How to change the status quo Eliminating acreage standards and the funding biases that favor new construction top the National Trust’s list of public policy recommendations. The report points to the State of Maryland, which eliminated acreage standards in the 1970s after recognizing that the standards could force the closure of all the schools in inner Baltimore. The National Trust also recommends that procedures for rejecting unsuitable land donations from developers be put in place; that school districts cooperate with other institutions to share playgrounds, ball fields, and parking; that school districts be given incentives not to defer maintenance; that the public be given greater opportunity to review school feasibility studies; and that governments should present plans for a school building’s adaptive reuse if it cannot be preserved as a school. New urbanist communities may also be able to improve the physical framework for education. In Southern Village in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, all children can reach the local school on foot or by bicycle. As a result, the school needs only half as many school buses as other new schools of comparable size. The school in Celebration, Florida, is controversial but proves how central the school is to community life. Communities fight back Why Johnny Can’t Walk to School details several successful grassroots efforts that have preserved neighborhood schools. In Durham, North Carolina, residents rallied against the closing of a school that did not meet the requirement for acreage per number of students. Engineers and architects in the neighborhood volunteered to complete an in-depth study of the cost of renovation and were able to discredit the inadequate analysis by the school board’s consultant. The new lower numbers prompted the school board to waive the acreage requirement and paved the way for a bond referendum that set aside money for the renovation. The school has been expanded and brought up to code for several hundred thousand dollars less than it would have cost to build a new school. A member of the Durham school board who supported the renovation identified the school’s importance to the community. “When you think about it, the school is the only structure that really pulls us together and gives us a sense of ownership over the neighborhood.”