District Administration - June 2007 - (Page 47)

Using 5,000 adobe bricks, high school students helped design and create the Robert F. Kennedy Charter High School in Albuquerque, from a U.S. post oﬃce. Districts save cash and time in adaptive reuse of buildings. Districts control hundreds of millions of dollars, and their decisions can make an impact, Smith notes. Looking for empty buildings could be an answer. “They can be recycling and regenerating and creating energy within their communities with what they do,” she adds. “Districts can also be very wasteful by going out and getting a whole new site.” Although most often it’s urban districts—which typically have no available or suﬃcient land—that undertake adaptive reuse projects, this development provides a great option for new schools. Various retail facilities such as vacant strip malls, “big-box” stores and supermarkets are options, as are oﬃce buildings, manufacturing facilities and even U.S. post oﬃces. The building must be structurally sound, properly zoned and in a secure location. Often a building intended for a commercial purpose does not meet the more www.DistrictAdministration.com stringent code requirements of a school, so the building must be renovated in such a way that it meets ﬁre codes and becomes handicapped accessible. But reusing a building as a school isn’t always much less expensive than new construction. The primary advantage of adaptive reuse projects is their time beneﬁts. Reusing buildings can save months of construction time since they don’t require demolishing an existing structure and building anew, or clearing land for a building. And for districts seeing a great increase in student enrollment, this can be the biggest beneﬁt of all, Smith says. However, even though adaptive reuse projects are beneﬁcial, districts and their architects will encounter challenges. For instance, the site location may be far from ideal. An empty retail store might be next to businesses like banks and grocery stores, so the public would be close to school grounds during school hours. It’s often a big challenge to maximize daylight in cavernous big-box stores, with natural lighting only around the perimeter. Parts of older buildings may be unusable, extending the time of the project. And it’s often a challenge to equip an older building with the necessary wiring to accommodate the computers and other technology that schools need. “You always ﬁnd things during the design process that you may not have anticipated,” according to David Kriegel, managing partner of New York-based architectural ﬁrm Gran Kriegel Associates. “But you can save money on a site with a building already on it. You’re saving money because you don’t have to demolish the building, and there’s also the ‘green’ aspect. We don’t recycle enough in this country, and if we demolish these existing buildings, they would wind up in landﬁlls.” June 2007 47 http://www.DistrictAdministration.com

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of District Administration - June 2007

Contents
Editor's Letter
Letters
News Update
Security Update
Technology Update
Curriculum Update
Inside the Law
Admistrator Profile
District Profile
Refreshing the ISTE Technology Standards
Action Teams
RE-Construction
Professional Development for the New Century
Multimedia LIT
New Products
Leadership Books
Problem/Solution
Online Edge
Speaking Out
Supervisor's Opinion
Professional Opinion
Research Corner
Calendar of Events
Understanding the Times

District Administration - June 2007