Global Innovations in Place - Conducting an Educational and Facilities Master Plan for Boston Public

The City of Boston has 128 schools serving 57,000 student. There are 24 different grade configurations
spread across the 128 schools. The smallest school is 9,000 sf and the largest is 918,000 sf. 84 schools or
65% were constructed prior to World War II. Eleven school buildings date from the 19th Century.
Conducting an Educational and Facilities Master Plan for this wide range of facilities was an enormous
undertaking. We conducted both physical assessments and educational facility effectiveness reviews for
all schools.
Our scope included: Educational Visioning including grade reconfiguration; educational delivery
discussions; the building and educational assessments noted above; demographic projections; financial
options for achieving the Master Plan and an approach for developing building models (options) for
future determination.
What was innovative and globally applicative is that rather than developing a report book, that would
likely have been feet thick (that’s a lot of surface area to collect dust) SMMA proposed to develop a
web-based “dashboard” accessible to the community as well as Boston Public Schools and the City.
This dashboard is now operational and available to all. The very significant data base developed to
record all of the data is in simple to use EXCEL and now in the hands of the client to be a working tool as
the district upgrades schools and systems.
The versatility of the dashboard allows to every school to be accessed from a simple At a Glance
approach to in-depth data. Schools can be filtered by school typology, grade configuration, era built,
neighborhood, and many other ways. Better yet, click here and see for your-self. www.buildbps.org
In addition to the presenters, client interviews will be imbedded in the presentation.
Presenters will demonstrate the system and discuss how it can be customized to meet other client
needs.

Participants:
Alex Pitkin AIA; Philip Poinelli FAIA, ALEP; Kate Jessup, RA, ALEP

For those who qualify, 1.5 LU/HSWs are available.

To learn more about the K-12 Educational Facilities Committee, visit architects.org/committees/k-12-educational-facilities-committee.

Click Register to attend

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