Webinar: Educational Facility Master Planning: A Roadmap for Success
Looking to create a roadmap for improving your local public school facilities? Watch this webinar to learn about a cornerstone element: the educational facility master plan. A master plan articulates a community’s vision and priorities for its school facilities and outlines the investments needed to make that vision a reality at each school. Tune in to learn about master planning best practices, including the role of education specifications, and hear lessons and insights from Boston Public Schools.
Speakers
Jeff Vincent, National Center on School Infrastructure
Bill Savidge, K12 School Facilities
Mary Morris, Right Foot Consulting
Susana Hernandez Morgan, Boston Public School
Key insights
Community engagement is the foundation of a successful master planning process. Effective master planning requires engaging everyone: the superintendent, the school board, teachers, parents, students, and neighborhood stakeholders. It may be time-consuming, but the payoff in community buy-in is real. This engagement builds consensus, reduces complaints during implementation, and ensures your schools serve as true community centers.
Education Specifications (Ed Specs) matter. Before assessing buildings or estimating costs, develop education specifications that translate your district’s educational vision into physical requirements. These can be aspirational and relatively generic, not solely reflective of current conditions. Skip this step, and you’ll risk building facilities that don’t actually serve your students’ learning needs.
- Using data from facilities conditions assessments alongside education-based planning to develop your master plan takes both building utility and functionality into account. “Painting a portrait of a learner” ensures you center the learning experience and community in building your master plan.
Let data drive decisions. Your plan needs accurate enrollment projections, realistic capacity analysis (accounting for special programs and class-size limits, not just square footage), and comprehensive facility condition assessments. Best practice includes developing District Facility Standards in conjunction with your Ed Specs to ensure that educational program requirements are met. Visit other schools and districts to see what’s possible and expand your vision beyond your current facilities.
School site planning and capital planning turn vision into funded reality. Site planning is where you develop a vision for each school, balancing capacity needs, building conditions, educational programs, and community priorities. Each site plan identifies required work and includes phasing to help the community understand construction impacts.
- Develop a rubric based on consensus on key ranking factors to prioritize work by structural safety, access compliance, educational program needs, capacity changes, and equity among schools. The goal is a capital plan that’s ambitious yet achievable.
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