Traditional education can be extremely isolating — the curriculum is often abstract and not relevant to real life, teachers and students don’t usually connect with resources and experts outside of the classroom, and many schools operate as if they were separate from their communities. — George Lucas, filmmaker
93% of city officials say that the quality of education is very important to the well-being of cities.
In many communities, access to schools is restricted in order to protect the children.
— Tracey Burns, education analyst
Studies of juvenile delinquency and high school drop-out rates demonstrate that a child is better off in a good neighborhood and a troubled family than he or she is in a troubled neighborhood and a good family. —Malcolm Gladwell, journalist and author
While 9 in 10 Americans think that all youth should have access to after-school programs, two-thirds say it is difficult to find programs locally.
Americans recognize that public schools are the heart of their communities. They are at least five times more likely to cite public schools than churches, hospitals, or libraries as their most important local institutions.
Sources (top to bottom): Edutopia, The George Lucas Educational Foundation, “A Word from George Lucas: Edutopia’s Role in Education”; National League of Cities, Institute for Youth, Education, and Families, “K-12 School Improvement: Why Municipal Leaders Make Education a City Priority”; Journal of Educational Change, “Learning and teaching, schools and communities”; Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference; U.S. Department of Education, 21st Century Community Learning Centers: Providing Quality Afterschool Learning Opportunities for America’s Families; National League of Cities, Institute for Youth, Education, and Families, Action Kit for Municipal Leaders: Improving Public Schools
Both the fortress and bubble schools are based on the premise that communities, particularly those in challenging urban contexts, have low social capital.
— Kathryn Riley, professor and author
While 71% of adult Americans say they walked or rode a bike to school when they were a child, today less than two in ten (17%) school-age children walk.
It takes a village to educate a child.
Urban educators get so beat up and accused of negligence when students don’t succeed, but the whole community, the whole village, has to be responsible for the education of our children.
— Dr. Reginald Mayo, superintendent
The percentage of children who live within a mile of school and who walk or bike to school has declined by nearly 25% in the last 30 years. Barely 21% of children today live within one mile of their school.
[My family] believed in the public school because they believed in a community.
— Garrison Keillor, broadcaster
Sources (top to bottom): Journal of Educational Change, “Can schools successfully meet their educational aims without the clear support of their local communities?”; Belden Russonello & Stewart Research and Communications, Americans’ Attitudes Toward Walking and Creating Better Walking Communities; Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia, “It Takes a Village”; National League of Cities, Institute for Youth, Education, and Families, Stronger Schools, Stronger Cities; Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in Children & Nature Network, Children and Nature 2008; National Education Association, “American
Education Week, November 11–17, 2007 Education Quotes”
LINDA SARATE
IT TAKES A VILLAGE TO BUILD A SCHOOL
Linda Sarate has lived in Little Village, on Chicago’s West Side, for most of her life and has been involved in her community as a local school council member at Gary Elementary School and as a community board member at both the Dr. Jorge Prieto Community Health Center and the Little Village Community Development Corporation. Although stricken with polio as a child, Linda has fought for her community whenever she was needed, and has raised three children. She participated in the hunger strike of 2001 that won Little Village and North Lawndale their new high school campus. This is her story of that battle for her children and her community.
If you were taking a visitor on a tour of Chicago’s Little Village, what would you want to show them so they could begin to understand your community? Oh, everything! Especially 26th Street — that’s our main strip. It’s got everything you can buy. There’s great food. Mexican health food stores — in the [Mexican American] culture there are a lot of herbs and teas that people drink to help them with different things. There are boutiques, grocery stores. People come from all over and walk up and down 26th Street for everything they need.
In addition to that great shopping strip, Little Village has had a high school for a long time, hasn’t it? Yes. It’s about 100 years old. It was the only high school in the area. They have great programs there, but the school has its issues. It’s in the middle of a gang area. And a lot of kids, either walking to, walking from, or within the building itself, have been beaten up. My nephew went for orientation. The night after orientation, somebody called him up and told him, “If you go back to school tomorrow, you’re going to get killed.” So my sister put him in another school, of course [in another neighborhood]. There’s an invisible boundary line and if you cross it you have your life in your hands. That’s one of the reasons Little Village needed another high school: so there’d be less tension, less chance of the kids getting hurt.
CPS (Chicago Public Schools) had already bought a parcel of land in Little Village, and they had cleared it, some time before you got involved. When you first talked to CPS, what were you told about why nothing had been built there? We were told, “There’s no money.” But we knew, by their own admission, that there had been $25 million set aside. They committed themselves by buying the land and clearing it off. They told us, “Well, we used that money for another project.” We had a series of public meetings, and we asked CPS to come out. They came with two separate models of what the school could look like. They said, “If you’re in this much of a rush to get your high school, and you can’t wait until we get more money, then here: take your pick.” But each model held only 800 students. The school my son went to alone graduated almost 200 students every year, and there are 8 or 10 “feeder” schools in the neighborhood. The high school would have opened up overcrowded. So we told them, “No, that’s unacceptable.” We started talking about an action. We wanted to do something peaceful that was going to be eye-opening, and we came up with a hunger strike.
The hunger strike lasted for 19 days, until it started to become a danger to the health of the strikers. By the time it had ended, what effect had the strike had? Days after it ended, we got a call from CPS, from the new CEO. The old one had resigned during the hunger strike. We didn’t get a 100 percent commitment, but we got 75–80 percent. Which was very well received. But we told him we were not going to take this slight victory and walk away from it; we were going to stick by it. And we did. Because we didn’t just get a commitment from CPS, we had also woken up the neighborhood. We had camped out right across the street from the school site. It was like a 24-hour celebration. People came out; they sang songs; they told stories; the older people in the neighborhood remembered when they used to fight for things too. Parents would tell us, “Oh, thank you.” And we’d say, “Don’t thank us yet. We have a lot to do and a long way to go.”
We had camped out right across the street from the school site. It was like a 24-hour celebration. People came out; they sang songs; they told stories.
Why did your group insist on being part of the entire planning process? Because we didn’t want them to just come in and tell us what we needed. We need our kids to know the basics — reading, writing, math — but we also want them to learn about their culture. Culture is very important. And if we were not involved, I don’t think that the school would reflect the neighborhood as well. We asked for a lot!
What are some of the things that you asked for? A dance studio for folkloric dancing. We wanted an Olympic-sized swimming pool, because we need our school to be open after hours. We have very limited park space in our neighborhood. This was somewhere to go, something to do, somewhere to be safe. And we’ve already had a couple of training programs for parents at the school — computer training and English classes — that was part of our mission too.
How do you think the school and the work that you did to get it built has changed the community? The kids, they love the school. That I know. My son was one of the first students. Well, he was part of it from the beginning. He would go with me on demonstrations, picketing. I think he feels really great that he was there and part of it, because since the first day of school, he has not missed a day. I’m so proud every time I say that! A teenager not wanting to miss school!
The alderman for Little Village had been fighting to get the school built for a couple of years before you got involved. Why do you think that a group of parents were able to get more than elected officials? Because that’s what we were — just regular, ordinary, neighborhood people, who took the lead, who decided to say, “Okay, we’re not going to stand for this any longer. Our children mean a lot to us, and they have to mean something to you.” We don’t need a school made of gold — that’s not what we were looking for. We were just looking for a good education for our kids, so they can have opportunities that we never had. They should be allowed that chance.
A SHORT HISTORY OF AMERICAN PUBLIC EDUCATION
A HISTORICAL OVERVIEW REVEALS SCHOOL’S STARRING ROLE IN THE GROWTH OF A NATION
When the U.S. nation’s founders set aside the 16th section of townships to produce funds to build schools, there was no curriculum, no image, and no clearly defined student body for these schools. Our core educational values date back to the days of the early republic, a predominantly agricultural environment, but much of the large-scale impetus for the development of a national public school system came through urban, industrial growth and then postindustrial decentralization.
In the early 20th century, architects such as Dwight H. Perkins began the movement to design public schools as urban neighborhood centers tied to the dense urban fabric. The idea of the school as a tool of social reform is not new. The workings of such schools — the mass production of a minimally educated population and the building of petit-monuments to the acquisition of specifically American knowledge — are a legacy of early 20th-century urban ideals. At the same time, however, educational leaders such as John Dewey began to focus on the child as a learning being, rather than an empty vessel for the reception of American values or the trained tool of industrial productivity. The continuing reconfiguration of the landscape, from dense cities into large urban regions, compels us to rebuild and more fully utilize these vital institutions of democratic life.
The accessibility of large quantities of undeveloped land allowed suburban schools to take on more “campus-like” forms. Streetcar and railroad suburbs could not have been conceived without the development of schools to absorb the youth of this family-centered culture. After World War II, schools were an important component in the planning of the Levittown communities [America’s first mass-produced suburbs]. Developer William Levitt stated the case succinctly: “A school has to be ready when the house is ready. It’s as important as a water main.” The sociologist Herbert Gans discovered that the politics of education created the greatest conflict among the Levittowners. Indeed, in postwar America, schools, and particularly the distance to them, were a critical component of the neighborhood unit. To the extent that urban diversity existed, schools were this diversity’s common denominator. Adapted from: Schools for Cities: Urban Strategies For more: www.nea.gov
NEW COLUMBIA COMMUNITY CAMPUS
NORTH PORTLAND, UNITED STATES
THE JURY IS IN ON A SCHOOL THAT COLOCATED WITH TWO OTHER COMMUNITY SERVICES
It didn’t have a name. No one was sure what it would look like. They simply called it the “new elementary school.” But, despite its lackluster label, architects and school officials knew this school would be anything but typical. It was 2004, and construction was under way at New Columbia, an 82-acre housing development in North Portland, Oregon. Built on the former site of Columbia Villa, a housing project constructed in 1942 for World War II defense workers, it would have twice the number of units than that of its predecessor. Of concern to Portland Public Schools (PPS) officials was how to accommodate an influx of new students into two existing neighborhood schools — Ball Elementary and Clarendon Elementary — neither of which had the necessary capacity. At Ball, a deteriorating building structure compounded the issue. A new school was needed, but the district had little capital for construction.
PPS and the Housing Authority of Portland were joined by architects and Portland Parks and Recreation to investigate several options. Out of their collaboration emerged the “community campus” concept. The campus would consist of a new Boys and Girls Club, a remodeled/renovated community center, and a new school, which would eventually be known as Rosa Parks School. Each facility would include shared spaces and offer services to students, their parents, and the community, and, by doing so, reduce the total project cost. Adapted from: “Textbook Tech” For more: www.architechmag.com
In 2007, the American Architectural Foundation (AAF) and KnowledgeWorks Foundation chose Rosa Parks School at New Columbia Community Campus as the winner of that year’s Richard Riley Award for Schools as Centers of Community. “This school is a national model for how the creative design of a school can help to revitalize an entire neighborhood,” said Ronald E. Bogle, president and CEO of the American Architectural Foundation. “It is a fantastic example for other school districts, showing how multiple partners can work together and provide a strong intergenerational focus.” The jury also singled out Rosa Parks School at New Columbia Community Campus because the design supports small learning environments, makes a variety of services available to the entire community, and has received a Gold LEED certification for sustainability. Adapted from: “American Architectural Foundation and Knowledgeworks Foundation Announce winner of 2007 Richard Riley Award” For more: www.archfoundation.org
EVANGELISCHE COMPREHENSIVE SCHOOL
GELSENKIRCHEN-BISMARCK, GERMANY
A GERMAN ARCHITECT IMAGINES CHILDREN DESIGNING A SCHOOL, THEN TURNS THAT VISION INTO REALITY
In the late 19th century, in the Ruhr area of Germany, an industrial suburb called Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck developed around a coalmine. In the 1990s, Fritz Sundermeier, a visionary educationalist, conceived the idea of catalyzing the redevelopment of the suburb by building a multicultural school and cultural center promoting ecological education. An architectural competition was launched.
Architect Peter Hubner won the competition with a written story that imagined the outcome, decades later, of his proposal. The story took the form of a hypothetical speech given in the year 2034 by a character named Kemal Özcül, who recounts how, as a child, he took part in the building of classrooms, housing, communal facilities, and ecological garden in a collaborative process involving teachers, pupils, the local community and outside professionals.
“At the beginning of the school year, architects, engineers, landscape architects and ecologists arrived at the school to present the whole remarkable project. We were told that we 134 boys and girls were going to build our own school, our own garden, our own world. We were full of the naïve optimism of childhood, our teachers were young and open-minded, and planners coaxed us on with their overwhelming enthusiasm, so that we thought of nothing but our new school … Nearly all the pupils were so taken with the excitement of building that they stayed long after school, remaining until late in the evening if the weather was good. My uncle Mehmet set up a kebab stall to cater for those whose parents had not sent them out with a picnic. From the balcony of the staff floor, Mrs. Kräuter-mayer could look down on the roof of our canteen where she had planted a herb garden. This not only served our kitchens, but a market stall, which we ran on Saturdays … Life together was self-regulating, as in a town that has grown up by itself, letting the houses come together harmoniously with the minimum of rules.”
After winning the competition with this story, Peter Hubner did enlist the help of area children to design the school. Adapted from: Evangelische Gesamtschule Gelsenkirchen-Bismarck: Kinder Bauen Iher Schule/Children Make Their Own School For more: www.plus-bauplanung.de
SCHOOLYARDS AS TOOLS FOR NEIGHBORHOOD REVITALIZATION
A COALITION OF COMMUNITY INTERESTS BUILDS NEW PLAYGROUNDS TO REBUILD CIVIC PRIDE
In 1994, a group called the Urban Land Use Task Force, funded by Boston area foundations, held a series of meetings to discuss Boston’s open spaces. The need for “clean, safe and green” schoolyards moved to the very top of the Task Force’s agenda. The Task Force approached Boston Mayor Thomas M. Menino, and with the mayor’s enthusiastic support, the result was the creation of the Boston Schoolyard Initiative in 1995. Within six years, half of the city’s public schools and every neighborhood in Boston were participating in the initiative.
While the most obvious product of any schoolyard project is the newly constructed schoolyard itself, a less tangible but equally important product is the process that moves the project forward. Every potential user and stakeholder is invited into the process at the earliest possible stage. This includes, most especially, each school’s students, but also parents, educators, administrators, custodians, before- and after school programs, summer camps, local merchants and business partners, crime watch groups, senior citizen groups, community-based organizations, and neighborhood residents. Together, these stakeholders attend a series of community meetings to assess local needs, develop a consensus about the design of capital improvements, raise funds, and consider how to create a system that will support sustainable schoolyard development.
When the Boston Schoolyard Initiative began its work, a survey of Boston’s 128 public schoolyards revealed an appallingly neglected patchwork of broken pavements, torn fences, compacted soil, and hazardous play equipment. Degraded school grounds had contributed to a sense of malaise and urban blight throughout the city. Most alarmingly, their poor condition was sending messages to students and to all local youth that they were simply not a priority. Today, negative conditions and messages have been replaced by a new era of hope. Renovated, attractive and useful schoolyards are acting as positive “tipping points” for the revitalization of entire communities, and negative attitudes have been replaced by feelings of excitement and optimism. Adapted from: “Designing Schoolyards & Building Community” For more: www.schoolyards.org
BUILDING A SCHOOL, RECONSTRUCTING A COMMUNITY
A SCHOOL AND AN APPROACH TO LEARNING RISE UP FROM THE RUBBLE OF WAR
Reggio Emilia is the name of a town in northern Italy. It is known internationally for its schools, founded on the philosophy that all children are different. Here, in the words of one of its pioneers, pedagogue Loris Malaguzzi, is the origin of the schools.
The history of our approach, and of my place in it, started six days after the end of the Second World War. It was the spring of 1945. I heard that in a small village called Villa Cella, a few miles from the town of Reggio Emilia, people decided to build and run a school for young children. That idea seemed incredible to me! I rushed there on my bike and I discovered that it was all quite true. I found women intent upon salvaging and washing pieces of brick. The people had gotten together and had decided that the money to begin the construction would come from the sale of an abandoned war tank, a few trucks, and some horses left behind by the retreating Germans. “The rest will come,” they said to me. “I am a teacher,” I said. “Good,” they said. “If that is true, come work with us.”
It all seemed unbelievable: the idea, the school, the inventory consisting of a tank, a few trucks, and horses. They explained everything to me: “We will build the school on our own, working at night and on Sundays. The land has been donated by a farmer; the bricks and beams will be salvaged from bombed houses; the sand will come from the river; the work will be volunteered by all of us.” “And the money to run the school?” A moment of embarrassment and then they said, “We will find it.” Women, men, young people — all farmers and workers, all special people who had survived a hundred war horrors — they were all dead serious.
Within eight months, the school and our friendship had set down roots. What happened at Villa Cella was but the first spark. Other schools were opened on the outskirts and in the poorest sections of town, all created and run by parents. Finding support for the school, in a devastated town, rich only in mourning and poverty, would be a long and difficult ordeal, and would require sacrifices and solidarity now unthinkable. When seven more schools were added in the poor areas surrounding the city to the “school of the tank” at Villa Cella, we understood that the phenomenon was irreversible.
When we started to work with these courageous parents, we felt both enthusiasm and fear. We knew perfectly well how weak and unprepared we were. We took stock of our resources — not a difficult task. More difficult was the task of increasing those resources. And even more difficult was to predict how we would use them with the children. We were able to imagine the great challenge, but we did not yet know our own capabilities nor those of the children. We informed the mothers that we, just as the children, had much to learn. A simple, liberating thought came to our aid, namely that things about children and for children are only learned from children. We knew how this was true and at the same time not true. But we needed that assertion and guiding principle; it gave us strength and turned out to be an essential part of our collective wisdom. It was a preparation for 1963, the year in which the first Reggio Emilia municipal schools came to life. Adapted from: The Hundred Languages of Children For more: www.reggioalliance.org
ROSA PARKS ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
REDMOND, UNITED STATES
A COMMUNITY DESIGNS NOT ONLY A SCHOOL BUT ALSO THE PATHS CHILDREN WALK TO GET THERE
This school in King County, just north of Seattle, opened in 2006, dedicated to the 50th anniversary of Rosa Parks’ refusal to give up her seat at the front of a public bus to a white man. Martin Luther King spearheaded a bus boycott, which led to desegregation in the United States, and Parks became a national symbol of civil rights.
However, students at the new Rosa Parks Elementary School may never board the kind of bus once ridden by its famous namesake. In fact, the school doesn’t even have a traditional school bus stop. Although there is an area for a bus to stop for field trips, and a large “park and ride” about one-quarter mile away, the school is not normally serviced by buses, and students are encouraged to walk or bicycle to school.
Designed to meet the interests of an environmentally committed neighborhood on Redmond Ridge, the school is connected to nearby homes by a series of walking and bicycle trails. Every day volunteers meet students at set times at designated points along the trails for a “walking bus” trip to the school. Students can join at the starting points or anywhere along the route.
The planning process for the school began with a public workshop attended by people living in the 900-home community, which had already established neighborhood design standards that called for pocket parks, large swaths of green belts, and undisturbed forests connected by walking trails. The standards seek a “national park ambiance” that features natural materials, colors, and plantings. The school’s design recalls the simplicity of national park architecture in its clean shapes, sloped shed roofs, large view-oriented windows, Douglas fir ceilings, and natural colors of deep brown and charcoal gray. The library, commons, and gymnasium are all accessible after hours and, as the largest public building in the neighborhood, the structure has become an important community asset. Adapted from: “Rosa Parks Elementary School Students Walk, Bicycle Rather Than Take the Bus” For more: www.edcmag.com
MICHELLE SAKAYAN
CREATING A COMMUNITY FOR SOUTH AFRICAN SCHOOLGIRLS
Michelle Sakayan is the founder of Sakayan Inc., a consulting firm facilitating programming, planning, design, and management for schools and charitable foundations. She has a Master’s of Architecture and began her career working at Nagle Hartray Architects in Chicago, where she specialized in K-12 education projects. While at Nagle Hartray, she worked with South African architects Jeremy Rose and Jonty Doke of Mashabane Rose Architects to realize the 26-building campus and mission of the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, designed to nurture, educate, and turn gifted South African girls from impoverished backgrounds into the country’s future leaders.
I think of an architect as a civil servant, and school design as a social act. You’re working with a community, and reflecting their needs. I’m really interested in making sure that the mission and the culture of a school shines through in the architecture, that it becomes a mirror of what the teachers, the students, the parents, and the administrators are trying to do there in their daily lives.
The architectural design of the Leadership Academy for Girls was our response to Oprah Winfrey’s dream and mission. This is a college preparatory school, a place to challenge local girls to go to college, and to take their knowledge either back to the town where they’re from or to other parts of the world. The school aims to foster the girls’ respect and appreciation for their own cultures and for the cultures of others. We went into the communities the girls would be coming from, visited schools, talked to kids. We made sure that the architecture responded not only to the dream and the mission but also to who the girls are.
Girls in South Africa, at this age, sit in circles. Boys sit in lines. Girls love circles, for singing and dancing too. They start chanting, and it becomes really rhythmic and contagious. So, on the campus, the buildings wrap around, like arms hugging, to make outdoor living rooms, spaces that encourage the girls to feel comfortable in circular gatherings. Every classroom opens onto a garden. It fans out, and beyond it are trees. We’ve mounded the earth under them into small hills that will seat at least 20 people, so that classes can be held outside. This takes advantage of the climate, and embraces the beauty of the South African landscape.
We want the school to be emblematic of South Africa because we want the girls to be proud of their heritage. We used scratched plaster, which is very common in the countryside here: Incredible patterns are scraped into the mud floors and walls of the roundevals, the traditional houses, so we did scratching here too, in a modern way. The girls are coming from 10 different cultural groups. Each culture has beadwork associated with it — anyone who is from South Africa can look at beadwork and say, “that’s Zulu,” or “that’s Tsoto.” In the middle of the campus, right in front of the dining hall, which is a popular place to sit, we put 10 columns. Each of the columns is decorated with one of the 10 culture’s beadwork, translated into mosaic. It’s become a landmark, a place of respect showing each girl that she’s important, no matter where she’s coming from.
CHICAGO PUBLIC SCHOOLS
CHICAGO, UNITED STATES
Chicago Mayor Richard Daley: Chicago is known for its beautiful lakefront, its dramatic skyline, and its outstanding architecture. But Chicago is much more than that. It’s a city of neighborhoods. Much of my work as mayor consists of using the tools of government to create the conditions that can lead to healthy, livable, thriving communities. So how does government help build stronger neighborhoods? You don’t tear down the old one and build something new on top. That’s been tried and it generally hasn’t worked. You start by building what I call community anchors: schools, libraries, parks, and police and fire stations. The most important anchor, by far, is the school.
When I became mayor, I inherited a public school system that had been run by a separate branch of government, over which the mayor had relatively little control. The school system was underper-forming and school buildings were literally falling apart, with broken windows, leaky roofs, peeling paint, inadequate heating systems, and crowded classrooms.
Those schools sent some very clear messages to the community. They told the children that we didn’t take education seriously. They told neighborhood residents, “The schools don’t maintain their property. Why should you maintain yours?”
So I got the law changed in 1995 to give the mayor personal responsibility for the Chicago Public Schools. We persuaded Chicagoans to raise their taxes to finance more than $4 billion of school construction and repair. In addition to building 118 new schools, additions, and annexes, we have torn out 100 asphalt playgrounds and turned them into campus parks for students and neighborhood residents. This has brought the residents closer to the schools, both literally and figuratively.
The object is to make our city a place where people live because they want to, not because they have to. If people want to live in your city, all sorts of good things happen. They take better care of their property, and encourage others to do so. They participate in public life. They brag about their city — and that, in turn, attracts tourists and prospective residents. They also attract new employers. In an economy based increasingly on providing information and services, rather than producing goods, employers can locate almost anywhere. They will be attracted to cities that provide an outstanding quality of life — and a well-educated workforce.
The public schools are central to my vision for Chicago because I firmly believe that a good quality education is the answer to all the social ills of big cities — crime, poverty, unemployment, economic decline, and middle-class flight. We’ve worked hard over the past several years to lift student’s expectations, to help them see high school graduation not as an end but as a first step toward a successful career in their chosen field. It’s not a glamorous endeavor: 85 percent of our public school students come from low-income families that struggle every day with drugs, crime, and, unfortunately, unemployment. You will not read about the strides of the public schools in U.S. Weekly or see it on CNN, or in the local daily newspaper, for that matter — at least not regularly. But I believe we should measure our success, at least in part, by the lives we’ve touched and the horizons we’ve widened. Adapted from: “Delivering Sustainable Communities Summit Address” For more: www.egov.cityofchicago.org
