As an indication of exactly where our government most wisely chooses to insert itself, the Obama administration announced this month 130$ million that will be made available to further research and implementation of energy-efficient retrofit technologies.

I recently worked on a design project through the University of Oregon School of Architecture & Allied Arts in collaboration with the Portland Public School district that sought to come up with energy-efficient design retrofits for existing elementary and middle schools based on school typology (courtyard, cluster, double-loaded corridor, finger, sprawling, etc.). The project was an offshoot of the 21st century schools initiative that was created as a product of the funding for new school construction and existing school repairs included in the Recovery & Reinvestment Act, and was based on the premise that our 30 billion+sq.ft of existing classrooms are in worse average condition and older than our nation’s prisons – and these are the places where we expect our children to learn!

The project was received warmly by the Portland Public School district, as our studio produced roughly 12 different retrofit designs for 4 different Portland schools (free of charge to the school district). In recent years, each of these schools had either added grade levels or was projected to continue to increase student population, which in turn created the need for these schools to be retro-fit and expanded. The design that I am currently still working on would provide nearly 20,000 sq. ft. of naturally ventilated, daylight filled, passively heated and cooled learning space as well as a new library and a nearly 15,000 sq. ft. learning courtyard.  While seeking to accomplish the same sustainable design standard in the existing 70,000 sq. ft school by focusing on retrofits that make the most out of simple changes to the roof structure (which is at the end of its life-cycle in this 70 year old school).

All the potential that our studio realized exists in these schools may be little more than lines on a page though. The school district is currently unable to make use of our thousands of hours of combined work because they have no money available for repairs beyond when plaster is falling off the walls or when a pipe bursts. This is compounded by, or potentially predicated by, the fact that the school district has not built a new school since the 80s and does not employ a design staff. Only a few veterans of the district have ever participated in or experience the construction of a new school or major renovation of an existing school. The obvious implications of this fact is that any design work, whether new school or renovation, will be done at a higher cost to the school district than with an in-house design staff.

I can hardly that imagine Portland Public Schools is the only district with this predicament. This issue becomes magnified when the public discourse surrounding our education system has more frequently been dominated by calls for voucher programs and charter school, and as the notion of abandoning the public school system is continually popular with American conservatives of late. The longer we wait to actually improve our existing schools, the easier it becomes to look at the system as failed, the easier the argument is to make for the wholesale abandoning of public schools.

That is not a course that I am comfortable with our country taking, the radical abandonment of public education, because it plainly neglects the role that such a free, public school system has played in our country’s rise toward the present. Back to objectivity though – here is a conservative education policy scholar and think-tanker that agrees on the utterly radical-nature of abandoning our public schools.