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for the Opportunity It Is
One of the largest public building programs in New Jersey history is about to begin and it is crucial that we see spending billions of dollars to build hundreds of schools as more than a court mandate in the wake of the state Supreme Court's Abbott decision. We must have the vision to realize this is also our greatest chance in generations to change the face of urban public education, and do it in a way that will make a major contribution to rebuilding our urban neighborhoods.
Making the most of this opportunity means making the right choices from the start. So far, we seem not to be. Legislation now being discussed is full of language that could stifle innovation, build new, unneeded bureaucracies, and cut corners on cost at the expense of urban youngsters' education.
City schools have historically been not just buildings, but centers for their neighborhoods and magnets for the aspirations of generations of children seeking to find their part of the American dream. Despite age and neglect, many New Jersey schools still fill this role. In our cities today there are some magnificent schools, built by people for whom public education mattered. Each is more than fifty years old; many more than a hundred.
The schools we build tomorrow will last as long. It is up to us to decide what message we leave to our descendants with what we build. To build schools that future generations will look back on fifty years from now and honor us for our achievement, we must follow three important principles To ignore any of the three is to shortchange our children and our communities.
The first principle is to build schools that address each community's specific educational needs.
There can be no "one size fits all." Schools should be designed to accommodate the widest variety of programs and activities, so that as needs and educational strategies change these schools can change with them. Schools should be designed to make possible the highest quality education that we can provide, not just the minimum, barely acceptable level we must provide. That means recognizing that populations grow. Empty space that can be utilized for a host of new and creative uses is better than suffering with jam-packed, overcrowded classrooms ten or twenty years from now because we failed to plan for the future.
And, parents and community leaders should be allowed to participate in the planning and design of new schools. If we are to have school-based management, we should have school-based planning as well.
The second principle is to build schools that will enhance the community-architecturally and aesthetically.
A beautiful building lifts up a neighborhood, an ugly one diminishes it. A look at urban school building since World War II tells us what to avoid, just as the schools built earlier, from the late 1800's, show us what an architecturally distinguished school can do for its surroundings. The last thing our cities need-with their dismal heritage of public housing, urban renewal projects, and windowless, fortress-like schools from the 60's and 70's - is a set of cookie-cutter plans, designed by architectural bureaucrats, and set down without regard to the visual character of the neighborhood or each site's particular features.
New Jersey is full of talented architects. Let's turned them loose to create individual, distinctive, unique and wonderful buildings that will be a source of pride, not shame, to their communities and the people who work and learn there.
And the third principle is that we must build schools that contribute to the rebuilding of the neighborhood they serve.
Schools do not exist in isolation. Every new school complex is a chance to change a neighborhood for the better. But it can't happen unless schools are carefully planned and designed to fit each neighborhood, rather than simply set down on the cheapest or most easily available site. By picking school sites carefully and creatively, new schools can enhance and strengthen housing developments and shopping districts, while eliminating neighborhood blight. By linking them with senior citizen and health care centers, as well as other community facilities, we can create true synergies between educational programs and community life. As shared, multiple-use facilities, schools can offer their communities recreational and other opportunities, and perhaps even save on costs.
These principles are not utopian or unrealistic. They are achievable-but not with a centralized, top-down process. Plans and designs standardized at the state level won't get the job done. Using the state's leverage to impose such plans on communities desperate for funds that only the state can provide would be the worst of all worlds.
We need policies that permit local communities - not just the school boards, but government officials, nonprofit corporations, and neighborhood associations - to use their creativity to come up with the sites, plans, and designs for schools that will provide the greatest educational opportunity and the greatest neighborhood benefit, not only today, but for the next fifty or a hundred years.
It won't be easy. Many school districts will need help to rise to this challenge. The state has an important role to play, not as a master builder, but as a partner, making sure its money is spent wisely, and holding local school districts to the highest standard of planning and design.
It is understandable, perhaps, that many state officials will prefer the easier way of simply doing it themselves. But the easy way is often the wrong way, and in this case our children and our cities would pay the price for generations to come.
Alan Mallach is a writer and a consultant on housing, land use and urban affairs. From 1990 to 1999 he was director of Housing and Development for the City of Trenton.
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