NSTA Position Statement
Science educators face many challenges—including national standards, state standards, district goals, and public demands—as they attempt to provide safe and effective science learning. Science students and educators require adequate working conditions to meet these challenges.
Center for Ecoliteracy
A recent and rapidly growing trend is designing schools with the specific intent of providing healthy, comfortable, and productive learning environments. However, these green, high-performance schools generally cost more to build — a major obstacle at a time of limited school budgets and an expanding student population.
Center for Ecoliteracy, 2012
Since 2010, Center education program director Carolie Sly has been engaged with Rainforth Grau Architects, GreenWorks Studio, and the Lodi Unified School District in California's Central Valley on design of a new STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics] Academy for the district.
Hobson
Relying heavily on income generated via local sources, mainly property taxes, to fund education has resulted in funding gaps, which have created disparities in the quality of education provided by public schools in the United States (U.S.). These funding gaps are further reinforced by the unequal allocation of education dollars at both the federal and state level.
Infographic via Sustainable Prosperity
Here's a great illustration of how the costs of urban and suburban infrastructure and transportation services vary greatly, with sprawling communities on the more expensive side of things. This handy infographic (click to expand) from environmental think tank Sustainable Prosperity, neatly displays the gaping differences between annual costs per household found in a study by the Halifax Regional Municipality in Nova Scotia. In total, the difference in annual city costs between suburban and urban homes in the region is $2,046 CAD, or $1,623 in U.S. dollars.
Environmental Protection Agency (2014)
The Idle Free Schools Toolkit includes all of the information needed to run an effective idling reduction campaign at a school in order to reduce student exposure to toxic vehicle exhaust. It also provides the resources to make this a student-run science or community involvement project, providing students with the opportunity to learn how to run a public service campaign while expanding their science and math skills.
Bartel, 2007
An ideal art room has some attributes that are the opposite of those needed in standard classroom. It can be expensive and less than ethical to construct inappropriate and unsafe facilities for learning in visual art.
I write this as an art teacher, designer, artist, and architectural design consultant. This checklist for school artroom design gives a minimum of features needed for art instruction. If you are an art teacher, a new facility is a "chance in a lifetime" to get the kind of teaching space you have always dreamed of. If you are an architect or an administrator, you can take pride in providing the best possible facilities for instruction.
Council of Educational Facilities Planners International, 2011
One of the fastest growing trends in school design is Net Zero Energy Schools. There are now at least a dozen or more schools completed or in construction that have achieved, or have committed to, this incredible level of energy efficiency.
Lowry, 2013
Good learning environment, LEED certified green buildings + control of common sources of poor IAQ + good maintenance = better attendance + increased student performance + better student health + reduced costs of operation.
Grimaz, Malison, & Torres, 2015
Ensuring the safety of people in case of natural hazards is one of the main concerns of public administrators in hazard-prone territories, particularly with reference to strategic and relevant major public buildings, such as schools. This requires the definition of a rational and effective strategy for risk reduction based on the level of risk, criticalities, countermeasures and costs. In order to evaluate these aspects, the SPRINT-Lab researchers of the University of Udine in Italy (1) developed the VISUS method (Visual Inspection for defining the Safety Upgrading Strategies). VISUS was first developed aiming to assess schools in a seismic scenario, but it has evolved into a holistic and multi-hazard approach that considers five issues: site conditions, structural performance, local structural criticalities, non-structural components and functional aspects. Each issue is analysed using a pre-codification of the expert reasoning, splitting the assessment in two main phases: the characterization and the evaluation. As a result, simple graphical indicators summarize the evaluation pointing out the main weaknesses and the needs of intervention. VISUS could be used as effective decision making tool for planning actions in risk mitigation at a regional scale following a rational approach. VISUS is adaptable to different local contexts and needs. The method provides different sub-products, such as the transfer of scientific knowledge through the capacity building of local engineers and decision makers; a mobile application for collecting related data; the production of school’s individual and collective reports; and geo-referenced national inventories of schools in mapping platforms such as OpenStreetMap or GeoNode. The method was elaborated and applied in the ASSESS project aimed at assessing more than 1000 schools in the Friuli Region (N-E of Italy) and recently it has been adopted in a prototypal project of UNESCO in 100 selected schools of three geographical departments of El Salvador (La Paz, La Libertad and San Salvador). UNESCO is planning to start new pilot projects in different countries worldwide.
