Why School Planning Needs to Be Part of Community Planning

It's time to rein in the nation's local school siting policies so that school planning becomes part of the solution, not part of the problem. Schools and smart growth policies can complement one another through promoting walking to small schools as well as to other community destinations.

In many places public and often private schools are allowed freely in residential zoning districts in a way analogous to churches. Occasionally a brave municipal government tries to confront the local school board about its decisions about where it will site schools, but often those conversations are half-hearted. After all, the school board is elected too, and an elected municipal government feels that an all-out show-down with the school board would be unpleasant.

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. 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 hugecommunity 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"?

3. 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 New Construction Bias 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, deferred maintenance, and any number of other possible hazards and defects, I have yet to see a public school board 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 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

Then there's the entire walking to school issue. 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. So walking to school could become a routine way of getting exercise, and a 15-minute walk each way would at least provide a half hour of walking daily.

But it's entirely different to ask a child to walk a half mile or mile to school than for school planning to set 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% plus of kids in the U.S. could walk to school.

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 arrivals and departures give communities a vested interest in good school planning and siting.

Need for School Planning and Community Planning to Come Together

In the current environment, before we get to small walkable schools for everyone, communities need to exert more land use control, through zoning, over schools. The free ride for the school board should be over, as many boards have abused the privilege. Unlike churches, which have enough constitutional protections to intimidate many a city council from zoning them out, school siting regulation through zoning is completely appropriate.

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

Yes, a dialogue with your school board in a series of joint meetings would be completely appropriate 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. While schools struggle to involve parents in their children's educations, it's hard to understand why they haven't figured out that 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.

An excellent article going into more depth about integrating smaller schools into the community better is available here.

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