When speaking to families about the new unified school, which voters will be asked to move forward on the November ballot, one of the concerns many bring forth is losing the community feel fostered in our current K-2 schools.
I understand this concern whole-heartedly. Community is crucial for the successful development and education of a student. It is at the core of our values as a school district. And both of these reasons are why building community has always been central to our vision and design plans for the new unified school.
I’d like to share how Scarborough School District thinks about community, ensures it takes priority in everything we do, and how strengthening community drives our work on the unified school: from site selection, to design plans, and everything in between.
Why is community important in education?
Fostering and empowering a sense of community in an educational setting is crucial for a child’s success. Community provides a sense of belonging, connectedness, and safety for children and builds the foundation required for optimal learning. A sense of community is facilitated structurally by designing a space specific for kids of primary school age and how they feel and react in a space. But it is also cultivated through intentional and consistent behavior and a deliberate community-first school culture.
If you’ve spent any time in our schools and with our amazing teachers, you know this is central to how we operate. I’m constantly struck when walking through the halls of any of our schools, just how lucky we are to have teachers who so exceptionally cultivate a welcoming, safe, and empowering sense of community and belonging for all our students.
How is community cultivated in the new unified school?
The new unified school prioritizes community in its design, and Scarborough school district prioritizes community in its district-wide culture.
Great care was taken to design the building to meet the community-developed design statement of “an intimate community of innovative, flexible, and inspirational learning neighborhoods that fosters inclusivity, collaboration, and hand-on learning.”
The building design breaks down the scale of a unified school into approachable layers of community, achieving a “school within a school” model, similar to the successful model currently experienced by students at Wentworth.
The first level of community separates the building into a “lower primary school” and an “upper primary school,” each with two grade levels and a “main street” that runs down the center of the building, providing access to shared common spaces (such as gyms, cafeteria, library).
Each “school” is then further broken down into 3 “Classroom Neighborhoods” per grade level, with 3-6 classrooms, an Academic Support space, and collaboration space. Special Education spaces are integrated within the grade level wings to foster inclusivity.
In the unified school plan, the travel distance from the main entry to the furthest classroom is the same distance students must currently travel between those locations at Eight Corners. Additionally, this distance is 200 linear feet shorter than the distance in Wentworth School.
To accommodate the physical education programming needs and schedule of the K-3 students, two elementary-sized gymnasiums are provided. There are two gymnasiums that have a dividing curtain so two classes can occur simultaneously in each gym, 4 classes total at any one time.
These are NOT large gymnasiums like Wentworth and the High School, which are approximately 10,000 sf with bleachers and have the ability to accommodate high school basketball games and bleachers. Instead, the unified school gyms are 5,000 and 7,000 square feet, with the larger one including bleachers to accommodate an audience for performances and other events.
These gyms are focused on the academic needs of the K-3 students and serve as a good example of the design philosophy employed throughout the school. They are designed to fit the specific structural and developmental milestone needs of the children.
How does the unified school greater support student and teacher collaboration?
The physical design of the educational spaces in the unified school enables students to feel connected with their peers so they can communicate, engage, and learn with and from each other on a small scale, while also having the exposure to and opportunity of a larger collaborative environment. Together with the school culture cultivated by our amazing teachers and staff, our students are able to access a community that will help them thrive.
Likewise our teachers and staff benefit from this shared collaborative environment to engage in conversations with each other around instruction, teaching methods, educational data and more.
A YES vote in November to move the new unified school forward is a vote to bring together the benefits of small communities with those of larger collaborative educational hub. It creates a win-win for students, teachers, and the community.
Want to learn more about the project or get involved? Visit ScarboroughSchoolSolution.org
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