Why School Planning Needs to Be Part of Community Planning

Many public and some private schools are allowed freely in residential zoning districts in the same way as churches. Occasionally a brave municipal government tries to confront the local school board about its decisions about where to build schools, but often those conversations are half-hearted.

The school board is elected too, and an elected municipal government feels that a show-down with the school board would be unpleasant.



It would. However, educating a school board and making it responsive to the broader public good is well within bounds of good public policy.

Let's disentangle and list the issues.

The Large School Issue

1. Large schools are an issue, both in terms of land used and students attending. In 2003, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sponsored research that showed that 27 states required a minimum school campus size.

The latest estimates I saw were that although we have twice as many students in school as in 1930, we have only about a third as many school buildings or complexes. So it's undisputed that schools are becoming larger.

2. In that same report (EPA 231-R-03-004, dated 2003), the EPA hinted that the trend toward larger schools should be reversed, allowing among other things, walking to school.

3. Because of large schools, students receive less personal academic and psychosocial attention. Research shows that minorities and female students perform better in smaller settings.

But of major concern to me, larger schools allow seriously maladjusted kids to hide. This is a huge community mental health issue. How much school violence could be prevented if the entire community of teachers and students knew each student better? And if there were no students that "no one knew"?

4. School boards opt to build the new, large campuses in locations that promote sprawl and definitely require all teachers, staff, and students to arrive by vehicle.

Frequently this occurs because of the school board mindset that a large school building site is necessary, and often they cannot practically assemble the land in the more compactly built portion of the district.

So a school, which should become a place of learning about living lightly on the earth, becomes a part of sprawl instead.

The Bias toward New Construction in School Planning

School boards have exhibited an unsupported bias toward new construction rather than rehabilitation of existing buildings. If the district's own buildings are too expensive to remodel, because of single-pane glass, asbestos, lead paint, deferred maintenance, and any number of other possible hazards and defects, a public school board could get creative and renovate a non-school building to serve as a school.

Please contact us if you know of an example. I've seen a number of adaptive reuses of closed public school buildings for private schools.

A sidebar to this entire issue is the backlash about the closing of historic schools that have long been an essential part of the fabric of the community. Often these school buildings then sit empty and deteriorate, particularly in older parts of the cities.

While we understand that school siting must follow residential patterns, the goal should be keeping the residential neighborhoods vibrant and avoiding housing decline.

Yet another argument for greater cooperation among municipal governments, school boards, and neighborhood associations emerges. And for telling those over-specialized bureaucrats at state education departments to learn something about community development.

School Planning Can Contribute to a Healthy Lifestyle

Childhood obesity has gone beyond the stage of jokes when kids are developing Type II diabetes. Obese children tend to become obese adults, and obesity is costing us our precious health care dollars.

Walking to school could become routine daily exercise, and a 15-minute walk each way would at least provide a half hour of walking daily.

But it's entirely impossible to ask a child to walk to school when school planning sets up a system where it's a three-mile walk in an urban area. With better school planning, over time, such long walks won't be needed. The federal government offers Safe Routes to School grants to help communities overcome the problem that now, many physical barriers prevent a safe walk to school.

Obviously rural and edge suburbs are a different situation. I rode a school bus and wouldn't have wanted the three-mile rural walk to one school and the four-mile walk to the second school. So I probably would have whined till my parents drove me there too, if the bus had not been available.

But with better school planning, in a few years 90 percent plus of kids in the U.S. could walk to school. The side benefit would be more walkable communities in general.

Need for Public and Private Schools to Be Treated Similarly

While researching this page for any new law or practice applicable to this topic, I noticed a frightening trend of municipal officials reviewing private schools quite strenuously while ceding school planning for the public system to the school board.

Parochial schools run by religious organizations could argue for the same kinds of freedom of religion protections that have restricted municipal powers significantly in church zoning.

My advice is just be careful that you do not apply more stringent standards to religious schools than private schools or public schools.

The truth is that in schools of all kinds, students and teachers typically arrive by vehicle, and those five-day-a-week traffic jams give communities a vested interest in good school planning and siting.

Need for Coordinated School Planning and Community Planning

In the current environment, before we get small walkable schools for everyone, communities need to exert more land use control, through zoning, over schools. Many school boards seem too overwhelmed with education and its peripheral issues to look at the broader community.

Unlike churches, which have enough constitutional protections to intimidate many a city council from sound zoning, school siting regulation through zoning is completely appropriate.

Traffic and parking considerations alone mean that school siting should be subjected to some additional level of scrutiny within the zoning ordinance. Don't just permit schools in residential districts. Add that conditional use permit requirement right away.

Yes, a dialogue with your school board in a series of joint meetings would be completely in order before you make changes. Involve school boards in any revisions to your comprehensive plan, and their school planning can become a sub-set of community planning. However, schools need to be subject to special use permits as long as most of the faculty, staff, and students arrive by vehicle.

Ideally school planning could provide for the types of multiple uses of school facilities as community centers that marked times past. Schools struggle to involve parents in their children's educations, but parents nearby are more likely to attend parent-teacher conferences or even drop in unannounced. And with many children needing volunteer or paid tutors, let's make it easier for caring adults to volunteer by making schools smaller and therefore closer to where people live.

Check out this excellent article going into more depth about smaller schools and integrating them into the community better.

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