WASHINGTON: For the past two years, it's been tough for Heather Snookal to teach lab exercises in a temporary school, with equipment competing for space on overcrowded desks. But after a $107 million renovation of historic Garfield High School, the environmental science teacher now has the nicest classroom she's seen. A 1,200-square-foot greenhouse attached to the back of her room, where lettuce or carrots can grow, will help her teach students where food comes from. There's plenty of dedicated lab space, and self-healing walls so she can tack up posters about whales, atomic structure or river restorations without creating permanent holes. "This is really just a gift for kids -- they're going to know they're important," Snookal said. "Giving them a space like this makes them feel like they can grow up to be scientists."

The construction project, five years in the making, is the most expensive school renovation Seattle Public Schools has tackled to date. Coming in nearly $30 million over the original budget, the project got under way as a building boom in Asia and construction for the 2010 Winter Olympics in Vancouver, B.C., drove up prices for steel, concrete and labor, district officials said. The district budgeted construction inflation at 4 percent per year, but it's recently tripled, said Don Gillmore, the district's building-excellence construction manager. "Here in the Pacific Rim, it's no longer a national economy, it's an international competition."

There also were plenty of idiosyncrasies in an original 1923 building excavated by steam shovel and built with hand-mixed concrete whose consistency varied day to day. The renovated Garfield High -- with high-tech classrooms, a new library with skylights, state of the art performance theater, and full-size football field -- was funded by a school construction levy approved in 2001. Getting rid of portable classrooms, which once obscured the view of the neo-Jacobean brick building, should make a huge difference, principal Ted Howard Jr. said. Many physical changes -- such as connecting formerly separated third-floor classrooms and adding professional office space for teachers -- will go a long way toward fostering collaboration, he said. To make efficient use of space in a school whose enrollment this year could be 1,840 -- 200 students beyond its ideal capacity -- some teachers must share classrooms, he said.

Because Garfield has for decades served as a touchstone for the Central Area community, it was important to preserve its history -- especially the outside of the building, Howard said. "People forget that schools are not just schools. They're homes to a lot of people," he said. A gentrifying neighborhood and the possibility that the new building will attract even more student interest likely will raise concerns about whether its diversity can be preserved, Howard said. But minority enrollment has remained fairly consistent over the past two decades, he said. To maintain continuity, marble from the barely functioning restrooms was recycled for a new reception area; an original wood-and plaster doorway with elaborately carved fish and flower designs was installed in the library. In the cavernous cafeteria space -- which also will hold large gatherings -- designers re-created from original architectural drawings a huge proscenium arch that was torn down in the 1970s. Four stairwells with light-drenching windows -- which were so expensive that the district quit building them after Garfield -- also were preserved.

RHODE ISLAND: Because the School Department has been slow to decide the long-term future of its aged elementary buildings, parents and students will find some major changes when classes begin. To comply with state fire codes, cafeterias and libraries in the basements of three of the schools have been relocated to upper levels, while separate space for music and art has been lost. The move has resulted in smaller libraries, more cramped classrooms, restricted gym hours and mobile “art carts” instead of art classrooms.
Midway through the last academic year, the School Department learned that the basements of Cranston Calvert, Coggeshall and Carey Schools were not in compliance with state fire codes because they lacked sprinklers. The School Committee had spent several years discussing what to do about the old buildings and was working toward a “fewer, newer schools” scenario under which some buildings would be closed and the remainder modernized. Ambrogi said the fire marshal agreed to let the basement be used for the rest of the school year in anticipation that a bond referendum would be passed for school construction.

But the state Department of Education rejected financing the School Committee’s preferred plan while the committee resisted accepting the less expensive plan that the state indicated it was willing to fund. At this point, no bond referendum is scheduled, the committee has not voted on what to do next and the fall election could change the makeup of the committee. In the meantime, said Ambrogi, the School Department had to comply with the state fire marshal’s order.
The School Department is awaiting the results of a $50,000 engineering study on what work will be necessary to bring the elementary buildings into compliance with the fire code. The study will include an estimate of what it would cost to install sprinklers in the basements of the school buildings.

NEW YORK: The current flurry of new luxury housing construction in New York City has created a number of quandaries for the city's public schools. The influx of students threatens to undermine the quality of nearby schools --often the very thing that helped attract young families in the first place. To further complicate matters, the high land values that good public schools help create make it increasingly difficult for the city to obtain land on which to build new ones. Developers see the expensive real estate as appropriate for only the most profitable projects, and that does not leave much room for schools. State Sen. Liz Krueger, whose Upper East Side district includes some of the most severely affected areas, has been urging developers and the Department of Education to find solutions. "Given the value of real estate in New York City," she said, "why should we have any schools, firehouses, or police stations at all?" The joke is grimly funny because these are essential amenities. But that doesn't make it any easier for the Department of Education to find land for a school in Midtown or Downtown Brooklyn.

Under city law, developers are not required to mitigate the effects their building would have on schools or infrastructure such as subways and roads. (See related story). Given that, city administrators and elected officials have had to be creative about finding ways to convince builders to help address school overcrowding. The strategies for getting additional classrooms tend to fall into one of two categories depending on whether the land is publicly or privately owned.
If the city owns the land for the new school, the building can become a project of the Department of Education's Educational Construction Fund, or ECF, an agency that offers developers the chance to build on public land in exchange for funding schools. The fund does not sell the land it gets from the city. Instead, it issues a request for proposals, picks a developer, then rents the property long-term in exchange for the developer's agreeing to plan and pay for the construction of a school on the site.
Things can get more contentious when a development is going up on private land. Then, communities must use the various approval procedures to try to get schools included. Requests for rezoning, the city's land use process -- known as ULURP -- and City Council votes all provide some opportunities for neighborhoods to make demands. However, the amount of leverage the community can muster depends more on whether a rezoning is needed than on the urgency of their needs

NEW YORK: It was once a place where unspeakable things happened. Children were taken from their parents. Fathers and mothers were charged with child abuse. But Brooklyn's Family Court building on Adams St. gets a new life. After an $82 million around-the-clock renovation, the building now houses the acclaimed Urban Assembly School for Law and Justice and the Urban Assembly Institute of Math and Science for Young Women. A high school for special education students also is at the site.

The new school building has state-of-the-art science labs and a gym. But the best feature of the downtown Brooklyn high school campus may be its location. Lawyers from the U.S. Attorney's Office will be able to walk just a few blocks to judge moot courts at the law-themed high school. Professors from the Polytechnic Institute of NYU can conduct high-level classes at the math-and-science school a block away from the university.
"The Department of Education understood that because of the type of schools we run that are very dependent on outside partnerships, that location really mattered," said Richard Kahan, of the nonprofit Urban Assembly. "Hopefully, we'll be a feeder school to Polytech," he said. Law and Justice principal Shannon Curran echoed the enthusiasm for being closer to the schools' partners, including Brooklyn Law School and the State Supreme Court. "It's not going to be such a big deal, them coming over to our school," said Curran.

It's not all about location, though. Law and Justice was previously located in an elementary school on Navy St. that lacked high school lab space, while Math and Science lacked access to a gym, said school officials.
In recent weeks, work on the building went 24 hours a day to meet the opening. "We've been working 'round the clock. We've got to make it happen," said one School Construction Authority employee working at the building just days before teachers reported to work.