Education and educational facilities remain a focus of public debate, influenced by new directions in technology and teaching, changing economic, social and legislative forces, and charged with an expanding mission by the communities they serve. Cannon Design has been a specialist in the planning and design of facilities that meet these challenges since our founding.

Our activities have ranged from district-wide master plans, capital and technology improvement programs to the renovation or expansion of existing facilities, and the development of new schools in rural, city, and suburban neighborhoods. Whatever the nature of the assignment, we use the power of our imagination, knowledge and experience to create environments that are an inspiration for learning, a source of community pride and a symbol of the educational mission.

Each ‘local school’ should embody the specific programming and planning as a critical component of the childhood to college educational continuum known as PreK/16. Our experiences across the country and overseas reinforce that to be effective design professionals we must focus first on being careful listeners at the inception of each client relationship.

The ‘program’ developed for each project will establish the essence of the educational mission, expectations, as well as standards by which the proposed project can be quantified and equitably measured. The ‘planning’ will seamlessly integrate best practices, and functionality that translate challenges into exciting opportunities. The operative mind-set thus is to program, plan and then explore the most meaningful possibilities as architectural solutions in a structured process.

The background accumulation must be specific to each client’s circumstances and context – whether an existing school, reconstruction, expansion, or entirely new initiative. The key is to benchmark the existing conditions relative to emerging trends in pedagogy and technology that have proven successful.

The common thread between high performance educators and students prepared to learn are facilities that profoundly encourage and sustain that dynamic human interaction. An accurate assessment of the conditions, capacities, and useful life of the facilities are the strategic touchstones to establish priorities, budgets, and ultimately the value and ‘do-ability’ of a proposed project. Our methodology involves a holistic evaluation of nearly 90 criteria from building systems to support spaces, accessibility and green design. The resulting assessment is a cumulative ‘snapshot’ that uses numerical rankings consistently across all criteria in an easily understood, reader-friendly manner.

The end goal of educating students who will achieve their full potential requires a solid foundation. In schools, that basic building block is high performance classrooms from PreK to graduation.

Research demonstrates that teaching and learning are acts of will. However, if the rudiments of math concepts and learning how to read fail to be established in PreK, that student invariably is at risk to be an underachiever. From pre-literacy through early childhood we advocate age-appropriate classrooms that provide discrete, small group learning and activity centers. We also advocate a technology infrastructure that provides in-classroom computer and digital resources as the baseline standard for both teachers’ and students’ use, general classroom as well as science, math and language labs. In the telecommunications would of today’s young people, the computer has to be as intrinsic and accessible as the pencil and calculator were for their parents.

The dilemma is to keep the instructional setting properly aligned with the psychological, physical and intellectual growth of young people as they enter and experience adolescence. That is a complex challenge for society at large, and in our middle schools the disconnects come into clear focus.

The fact is by the ‘middle years’ we expect our students to have the confidence and mastery beyond learning to read, but instead reading to learn. The impacts upon schools are equally profound because information and events around the world are instantly available in the 21st Century cyber-age. Thus, capturing and retaining each student’s attention span is far more difficult, and demands that education and design professionals truly partner to implement solutions that speak to the mind and imagination

Today’s high schools are translating possibilities into achievements that demonstrate a greater purposefulness than ‘a school is just a school’. The students’ interests and skill sets to successfully compete individually and collectively as a team in the global marketplace are now at the forefront of ‘hands-on’, uniquely transformative experiences in our secondary schools.

We have planned and designed high schools that feature ninth grade academies, house plans, academic/technical schools of excellence, and middle colleges where students cross register with local institutions of higher education. The trend is we must re-establish advanced skills in math and science to assure thought leadership in future generations. Accordingly, the archaic boundaries of time, school year and even setting are being blurred by technology where it is becoming customary to bring the professor into the high school classroom, and vice-versa.

The world of private schools, although distinct, still keeps a mindful eye on the national trends and dialogue in the educational communities. A more accurate differentiator is that our private school clients are far more nimble at identifying the issues, priorities and a plan of action in response.

Our portfolio of private schools reveals that the market pressures to stay current, cost effective – yet quality results oriented –present real challenges that only vary by degrees. An important distinction we often recognize and enhance is the value placed on the student life aspects. Those important details span the spectrum from formal and informal student common spaces; to he library as the symbolic seat of learning; individual health and team athletics; to the auditorium and even the cafeteria as the daily theatre of life. The facilities must reflect traditions and embrace the education of each child in a personalized and holistic approach.

The higher expectations placed upon our students, coupled with the wider usages and complexity of our school facilities contribute to the increasing cost of today’s capital improvements. For example, the safety of our children once was taken for granted, but now requires sophisticated entry, surveillance and wireless VolP systems.

A common misnomer is the presumption that good design is also expensive. Our Pk/12 practice is a testament in both the public and private sectors that great design results form a couple of strategic factors: opportunity; fundamentally great decisions; and most importantly the ability to partner in a cooperative, win/win spirit with each client, user and stakeholder. Capital projects are major investments of valuable resources that simply must optimize the clarity of vision, purpose and accountability.