A Clear Path Through Facility Improvements

By Scott Downie, AIA, LEED AP

Facility improvements in K-12 schools are rarely straightforward. From assessing needs, to identifying funding, gaining approvals, and ultimately, managing construction, the process can pack surprises. Knowing where they hide is the key to smart planning to make sure your process moves smoothly to completion. Is it possible to cut through the uncertainty, reduce costs, and create facilities that support both students and staff for years to come?

With the right strategies, yes. Spiezle works to help school districts bring clarity to this process. By breaking it into manageable steps and enabling schools to move from vision to reality with confidence.

Step 1: Step Out – Seek Input
The journey begins with a clear understanding of what your district truly needs. This is a collaborative effort involving administrators, teachers, facilities staff, and community stakeholders. It is important to approach this as a dialog. Facility directors, business administrators, and others need to solicit, encourage, and capture the feedback of those facing facility challenges day by day – teachers, students, and parents. Without this input, you and your professionals have blind spots and will miss key challenges and context for the problems you are trying to address. Schools serve to create and enhance educational opportunities, and if there are ways that your facilities limit your ability to deliver an inspiring curriculum to your students, that is a fumble as important as an aging roof. Understanding these challenges and structuring efficient solutions is not an exercise to undertake in a vacuum. Diverse input is critical to creating an efficient facility plan. Additionally, this stakeholder interaction begins the process of building understanding and support around the need for and importance of funding facility improvements.

Step 2: Understand Facility Needs Wholistically – The Three-Legged Stool
Where do you start? Keep the analogy of the three-legged stool in mind. In our case, this means understanding: 1) Program, 2) Capacity, and 3) Physical plant needs. Look at just one or even two, and the stool cannot stand up.

Education is constantly evolving, and faster than ever. Today’s students expect different things from their educational exposures, and programs need to evolve to enhance skills training, communication, critical thinking, and project-based learning versus rote learning. With the average U.S. school building now around 50 years old, the potential is very high for older facilities to impede your ability to adapt your educational delivery to today’s changing needs. When you talk with your teachers, you will come to understand the particulars of this, and needing to design or improve facilities to ‘get them out of the way’ of 21^st century teaching and learning delivery is almost guaranteed to be a challenge for which you need to develop solutions.

The question of capacity – or how many seats do I need? – is a question that needs to consider not just how many, but what type of seats are needed. If you have been adapting classrooms over the years to serve STEAM and specialized instruction and are busting at the seams, just adding classrooms may be the wrong answer. When faced with growing enrollments, it is critical to ensure that expansions or renovations not only add seats, but also address your programmatic challenges as well as capacity. If you are facing declining enrollments, seek to understand why and use the opportunity to adapt your facilities to enhance what you can deliver for your students.

Our focus on program and capacity must not forget the third leg of our stool: physical plant needs. Physical needs are often visible and more easily assessed and noticed, but not always. While roofs and windows are critical to keeping your facilities operating, providing facilities in which students feel comfortable and safe is critical to educational success. The impact of safety and comfort on educational outcomes has been studied and can often depend on somewhat more abstract factors than a leaking roof. How is security structured in your schools? How about color and finish diversity? Proper acoustics? Daylighting? Adequate ventilation and proper temperature? Furniture that is diverse, flexible, and comfortable? These are all factors that can impact educational outcomes and the relationship forged between your learners, teachers and your facilities.

Finally, every potential investment must be weighed against available resources and its long-term impact on staff and students. Taking the time to set priorities and build consensus ensures that your district invests wisely rather than reactively.

Step 3: Funding – Making It Happen
Funding is often a heavy hurdle to overcome, especially with constantly rising construction costs and challenges, but districts have more pathways available than they may realize. For example, improvements that save energy can often capture incentives or tap into self-funding structures (i.e., Energy Savings Improvement Plans) to fund improvements with minimal to no capital outlay. Lease purchase options or capital reserve funds can be used to reduce public funding needs, such as referendum or other tax based fundings, particularly when public approval is involved. Cooperative purchasing strategies can often be used to reduce project timelines and control results where specialized equipment is needed and should be part of the overall strategy considered.

If a referendum or other public funding structure is needed, and you have been following the advice we have laid out here, you are already building support among your community through your stakeholder outreach and input process. Continue to build on this by engaging the conversation around not just “what” needs to be done, but “why,” and how other alternative approaches fall short. The challenges faced with public referenda will vary community by community, and succeeding requires your communications about needs and solutions to meet people where they are – help them understand what is to be gained and the broader value proposition. And, importantly, once you pass your referendum and move forward, don’t forget your stakeholders. Keeping them apprised of how construction is going, inviting them in to see solutions in action, and keeping a regular dialog with them into the future is an important long game that needs to be played. Why? Because some years down the road, this process will play out again, and if you have been fostering that engagement, you will already be on the road to success.

Step 4: Understanding Timeframes and Costs
Facility projects vary widely in complexity, and with that variation comes different timelines and cost impacts. A truism of schools is they need to keep operating. Summer periods are shorter now than they once were and the amount of construction that can occur in summer is less and less. Year-round improvement projects can happen successfully, but there are cost impacts to second shift (after school) construction, and phasing planning is key to safely maintaining operations through construction. Work with your professional team to make sure phasing is considered along with the earliest conceptual design. To be successful it cannot be an afterthought.

More than just smart planning, understanding the timelines for different types of projects and initiating them well ahead of deadlines substantially increases your options. Early bidding will often enable you to capture better pricing. When you bid summer projects in late spring, chances are that contractors are already filling out their capacity for summer work. That is a train you benefit from being in front of versus behind. Larger projects, or projects requiring multiple agency approvals, need to be planned out carefully to consider realistic submission and approval timeframes to avoid them impacting when construction can begin. Work with your professional team to brainstorm target schedules and contingency schedules at each juncture of your development process. For example, always assume you may have bid issues and leave time for re-bid windows to be safe.

Keeping your Long-Range Facilities Plan (LRFP) current is critical, as it positions you to better capture incentive programs and other opportunities as they arise. Having a solid plan (remember the three-legged stool) helps you understand your future budget challenges, puts you in the position to plan in advance, and broadens your options to engage different types of financing for the most cost-effective results.

Step 5: Assemble the Right Team
Assembling the right team is as critical as understanding your needs, priorities, and which funding strategies that will work. The specific composition depends on the project, but look to the experience and diversity of ideas that an architect, engineer, construction manager, financial and legal advisors, and others will bring to your table. Other specialized consultants may also play critical roles, such as environmental consultants and site engineers. Consider your contracting structure for your team – typically structural, mechanical, electrical, and other engineering professionals may be contracted through your architect, but others, such as the construction manager, legal and financial team, environmental or site engineering may need to be contracted directly. They can often be hired in different ways as well – for example, many clients will hire architects through an RFP process, but they along with other licensed professionals can be contracted under various procurement strategies. Construction managers are often selected under RFP and in New Jersey, Extraordinary Unspecifiable Services requirements, versus a bid based on fee alone. This is important when you bring on your team, because while costs certainly matter, picking the right team with the right personnel is critical to building successful and fruitful working relationships that will help you though your multi-year facility challenges.

Step 6: Planning a Smooth Construction Process
If you haven’t guessed already, once again, early and holistic planning is critical to manage the construction process successfully from inception through completion. Constantly asking next level questions at every milestone not only helps you understand where things might diverge from your plan, but also fosters solution development in advance for quick implementation when issues arise. Even the most carefully designed project can falter, if you are not in a position to respond quickly to the unexpected when it occurs – and yes, it will occur. Once you have assembled a great team, engage them constantly. Having everyone at the table is critical to understanding challenges and developing the best solutions. Much like understanding your needs, construction cannot occur in a vacuum and requires proactive, clear communications daily. From pre-planning – essential to securing timely approvals with the Department of Education, local code officials, and other agencies – to identifying the right bidding strategies and timelines, a well selected team will run ahead of you on these things and help you be prepared in advance.

Internally preparing your district team for the realities of construction is an often-overlooked but critical step – not only for ensuring smooth decision-making throughout the project, but also for preserving your own sanity. If you are a business administrator or facility manager, a construction project can challenge your understanding of your job description. Construction demands time constantly and at the most inopportune moments, requiring timely decisions and a clear grasp of on-site challenges. Preparing your team in advance to distribute day-to-day duties and establish alternate arrangements will be critical to juggling all the demands of construction.

A Clearer Path Forward
Understanding, implementing, and funding your needed facility improvements can feel daunting, but doesn’t have to be overwhelming. With careful planning to stay ahead of the train, reaching out beyond yourself to engage stakeholders, and a smartly assembled team, you can tame the beast, achieve great results. and move forward with confidence.

At Spiezle, we are committed to helping schools cut through the facility improvement fog with thoughtful planning and the right expertise. We welcome the opportunity to explore solutions and help you create opportunities to enhance student outcomes and community pride.