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Tag: School Siting

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Environmental Protection Agency (2015)

School locations and community development are inextricably linked. School locations affect community land use patterns and infrastructure needs. Local land use, the location and capacity of road and utility networks, and community investments in economic development, housing, and other social programs affect school surroundings and learning environments. Taken together, school siting and other community decisions influence housing and transportation choices, neighborhood vitality, economic development, costs of community services, environmental quality, and overall community health and well-being.

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David Henebry, AIA NCARB ALEP, 2016

The traditional process of locating schools has consisted simply of mapping attendance areas and meeting with realtors to discuss and choose an available property. Today, however, due to a stronger understanding of the socioeconomic impacts of the development of schools on communities, there is a desire to explore a smarter approach to identify sites for schools. The objective of this essay is to provide a comprehensive, long-term strategic approach for siting schools in growing communities. Now that we have a stronger understanding of the socioeconomic impacts of development on communities, we want to explore a smarter approach to identifying sites for schools. This paper is focused on a comprehensive long term strategic approach to identifying sites for schools in growing communities.

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In 2004, the Oregon Transportation and Growth Management Program contracted with the Community Planning Workshop (CPW) at the University of Oregon to conduct a year-long evaluation of Oregon’s school siting process. The purpose of the evaluation was twofold: (1) to develop a better understanding
of the challenges and opportunities school districts and local governments experience when making school siting decisions; (2) to empower school districts and local governments to make more informed decisions about future school siting. This handbook is the culmination of that research and synthesizes many of the lessons learned.

As part of the study, CPW performed the following tasks:

Literature Review: Conducted an extensive review of literature about school siting issues.

Case Studies: Investigated the school siting practices of eight school districts around the state through site visits and interviews with school superintendents, school facility planners, local government planners, architects, and neighborhood groups. Administered a school transportation survey and conducted focus groups at four middle schools to learn more about how children get to and from school.

School Superintendent Survey: Created a survey, disseminated to school district superintendents, focusing on district needs and siting issues.

Oregon School Siting Forum: Held a statewide conference encouraging dialogue about school siting issues by a wide range of people, including school district personnel, architects, planners, health advocates, and neighborhood organizers.

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School Planning and Management, 2015

Instant communications quickly turn the media spotlight on any newsworthy event. Negative publicity has resulted in school districts revisiting their commitment and attention to ensure life safety in every way possible. The growing importance of mass notification, inspection reporting and fire protection systems technologies have facilities managers scrambling to keep pace.

Changes in technology can substantially impact the physical systems that protect students, staff and visitors from fires in our schools.

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Gaffron & Niemeier, 2015

It has been shown that the location of schools near heavily trafficked roads can have detrimental effects on the health of children attending those schools. It is therefore desirable to screen both existing school locations and potential new school sites to assess either the need for remedial measures or suitability for the intended use. Current screening tools and public guidance on school siting are either too coarse in their spatial resolution for assessing individual sites or are highly resource intensive in their execution (e.g., through dispersion modeling). We propose a new method to help bridge the gap between these two approaches. Using this method, we also examine the public K-12 schools in the Sacramento Area Council of Governments Region, California (USA) from an environmental justice perspective. We find that PM2.5 emissions from road traffic affecting a school site are significantly positively correlated with the following metrics: percent share of Black, Hispanic and multi-ethnic students, percent share of students eligible for subsidized meals. The emissions metric correlates negatively with the schools’ Academic Performance Index, the share of White students and average parental education levels. Our PM2.5 metric also correlates with the traffic related, census tract level screening indicators from the California Communities Environmental Health Screening Tool and the tool’s tract level rate of asthma related emergency department visits.

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Kuhlman, R. (2010).

School districts are responsible for the education of almost 50 million public school students. Nearly all decision about the use and location of school facilities are made by local school districts-but the impact of these decisions goes far beyond the school and the education of its students. This report identifies the larger community interest in decisions about retaining existing schools and deciding where to locate new ones. It describes the states' role in school siting decisions and identifies state level policy changes that will ensure that educational, environmental, health, community, and fiscal considerations are weighed by communities when school districts make school closing, consolidation, and site selection decisions.

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Salvesen, D., Zambito, P., Hamstead, Z. Wilson, B. (2008).

The purpose of this study was to determine the extent to which public schools in North Carolina are located close to environmental hazards and whether state policies for siting schools adequately address the potential threats posed by such hazards. We also sought to demonstrate the usefulness of GIS technology and existing data sources to map environmental hazards that are in close proximity to schools. We relied primarily on secondary data sources that were readily accessible from the web, including EPA’s Envirofacts database.

http://www.ie.unc.edu/cscd/other_docs/schools_final_report-12-30-08.pdf

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