Here’s What Designers and Architects Anticipate Schools Will Look Like in the Fall and After COVID-19 – Spaces4Learning

Reopening Schools

With the school year ending soon, schools across the country are looking ahead to the fall. The CDC recently released a one-page checklist for administrators to consider when reopening schools that include screening students and staff upon their arrival, increasing cleaning and disinfecting throughout facilities, social distancing, promoting regular hand washing and employees wearing face coverings.

These guidelines, along with input from state and local health officials, will impact the learning environment moving forward. We asked designers and architects from across the country what they anticipate classrooms will look like in the fall if they were to reopen, how the coronavirus will impact school design in the long-term, and suggestions on design concepts schools can implement right away to help with social distancing in facilities. Their answers offer insight to available design options and possibilities that can help school leaders plan and make the best decisions for their students and staff.

Answers have been edited for length and clarity.

Within classrooms, there may be a need to create physical distance by making operational decisions such as staggering the number of students within the physical space. Perhaps by deploying remote learning tools and strategies, students can join the classroom instruction from another location within the school building. James E. LaPosta Jr., FAIA, LEED AP, Principal, Chief Architectural Officer at JCJ Architecture

Because schools dont have the time or the funding to build additional classrooms or make the ones they have bigger, they are left with options that strategically alter how existing space is being utilized. For example, schools could use colored tape to mark circulation patterns and six-foot queueing distances on the floor (as were now seeing in grocery stores) around offices, lunchrooms and other locations. Other strategies may require enacting changes in social design, such as dividing the students into groups on a rotating schedule of in-person and distance/online learning. As for classrooms often already challenged with overcrowding schools may need to make tough choices. In classrooms where there is a support area, temporarily removing the support area furnishings may allow desks to be sufficiently separated. Alternatively, larger classes could be moved into the gymnasium or the cafeteria, or even outdoors should weather permit. Julia McFadden, AIA, associate principal and K-12 sector leader for Svigals + Partners, New Haven, CT

As students return to K-12 classrooms in the fall they will be greeted with the next normal a classroom hyper-focused on hygiene, social-distancing, and enhanced air filtration. Most, if not all of these next normal will become routine but will they take away from the learning experience, after all they are bolt-on measures born from reaction rather than proactive design thinking. Billions will be spent by schools all over the world to react in this way and it will not improve the learning environment for our children. After all we are social creatures and we learn by doing in an interactive, socially engaged environment. Jason Boyer, AIA, LEED AP, Principal at Studio Ma, Phoenix, AZ.

The Fall (of 2020) is way too early to anticipate meaningful, long-term, changes of any kind, in life, or in anything at all as planning, design and building take significant time; months, years. Sure, Fall 2020 will be a different experience for the class of 2024 and maybe the classes of 2025, 2026 and 2027.

But will it stay that way? There is no telling. So, in what ways might it change? This remains to be seen.

The shift in thinking the COVID19 crisis will precipitate will likely take five years or more to manifest itself in measurable ways certainly that long in new buildings; most likely more time than that. John Kirk, AIA, Partner, Cooper Robertson

Schools will likely step up the level of monitoring of each individual students health with daily (or more frequent) symptom checks while promoting hygiene in the daily routine. The latter will probably include handwashing stations at building and classroom entrances coupled with increased cleaning and sanitizing protocols for students, faculty and staff. Mark A. Sullivan, AIA, LEED AP, partner with JZA+D

Read the original post:
Here's What Designers and Architects Anticipate Schools Will Look Like in the Fall and After COVID-19 - Spaces4Learning