Capital Projects Quarterly Newsletter
Building Excellence III Program
Building Excellence III Program
On September 8th the ribbon will be cut at the new South Shore School – an innovative new education environment that will accommodate 810 students from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade. Join architects, construction teams, community members, students, families, teachers and staff to celebrate!
South Shore incorporates features designed to emphasize connections within the Rainer Beach neighborhood.
Aerial view of South Shore school under construction, July 2009.
It shares a large community-use campus that includes the recently built South Lake High School, a city park, a public plaza at South Henderson and Rainier Avenue South and the Rainier Beach Community Center. The school gymnasium will be available for community use during non-school hours. The project was funded Building Excellence III (BEX III) Bond approved by Seattle voters in February 2007.
The school design supports the SPS five-year strategic plan, Excellence for All,by creating small learning communities with classrooms clustered around flexible shared spaces to support diverse styles of learning and teaching. The rotunda provides a friendly, welcoming “community living room” for the school and can also be used for local gatherings. Sustainable design features – natural light, non-toxic finishes and state-of-the art ventilation systems – create a safer, healthier, more energy-efficient building to improve learning and reduce operating costs.
The dedication celebration begins at 9:30 a.m. on the Rainier/Henderson Plaza adjacent to the school. Speakers will include Superintendent Goodloe- Johnson, a member of the Seattle School Board and South Shore Principal Sherrie Encarnacion. In recognition of the diverse ethnic makeup of the Rainier Valley and South Shore student population, a parade of flags will represent countries and cultures from throughout the world. Lion dancers and live music will continue the festive program. Many on the long list of people that have been part of creating this new school will be recognized and appreciated for their commitment to ensuring it was completed on time and within budget. At the end of the celebration, attendees will be invited to tour the new school building.
South Shore School Students try on construction hard hats and discover what it feels like to step into the role of the architect.
Students, parents, teachers and community volunteers from The New School at Columbia eagerly filed into the Rainier Valley Cultural Center in April. They were there to find out more about their much-anticipated new school – South Shore School, which opens to students in September 2009 — from the architects who are leading the design effort.
Located at the intersection of Rainier Avenue South and South Henderson Street, South Shore School will meet the growing education needs of the Rainier Beach community and maintain the New School’s strong connection with the Rainier Beach Community Center.
New School principal Sherrie Encarnacion opened the event by telling the gathered students that the new school building they would move to in September was designed to increase and enhance learning for all students.
South Shore School students arriving at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center to attend the architect’s presentation.
Scott Hogman from BLRB Architects then took the stage to present a slide show titled Design and Construction of Your New School. BLRB is the architectural firm for the project. As part of the design process, the BLRB team worked in collaboration with the South Shore School Design Team – a group of community members and Seattle Public Schools (SPS) teachers and staff - who met over a two-year period to determine needs and create a space that supports excellence in student learning.
New South Shore School mascot, design work donated by Zeus Design
Hogman led the audience through the entire creative process, from concepts through drawings and models and showed photos of the construction currently underway. By focusing on specific locations, such as the gymnasium, rotunda and library, students could follow the project and see how it developed over time.
The South Shore School’s new rotunda nears completion.
In developing the design for South Shore, BLRB considered studies that indicate that introducing controlled daylight in the classroom improves learning. Light-flooded rooms also create a more pleasant environment for students, teachers and staff throughout the day. The windows are designed to let in ample daylight and include sunshades to control glare and reduce unwanted heat. In addition, the school’s heating and cooling systems are state-of-the-art, adjusting to climate changes and using high-efficiency air filtration.
"There are a lot of naturally lit, bright and open spaces that help learning and teaching,” said Hogman. “It’s a big difference from the old school with its dark hallways and crammed paces.”
New entryway nears completion.
The audience learned that the new school building includes flexible learning spaces and classrooms, a rotunda that will serve as the school’s social gathering area and an overall design that will allow students to learn in a variety of ways. Meeting the needs of diverse learners is a major goal in the SPS five-year strategic plan, Excellence for All. Modern middle school science classrooms will support another strategic plan goal — to prepare students for college and careers — by allowing for a strong science curriculum that leads to higher-level classes in high school and beyond.
Photos and drawings of the new building were greeted with cheers, followed by equally enthusiastic “boos” for images of the corresponding spaces in the Columbia South Shore School students arriving at the Rainier Valley Cultural Center to attend the architect’s presentation.
Thanks to cooperation between Seattle Parks and Recreation, Seattle Public Schools and the Wallingford community, a safe, smooth, wide-open connection between the Hamilton International Middle School and Wallingford Playfield will open next fall.
The new design ties the two adjacent properties, now separated by a fence and an upward slope from the school to the park, together giving students and the community open access.
The landscape design includes a larger garden area and a larger outdoor paved play space for community use. The neighborhood will be able to use Hamilton’s renovated gym and take advantage of a new amphitheater that features 60 seats made from huge boulders.
Hamilton students will gain direct access to the park and its playfields; previously students had to walk around a fence at the back of school property to play as the 80-year-old facility lacked the property to include playfields. Today, one cannot see into the park from the school paved play area due to the upward slope and large shrubs, trees and gardens.
Proposed Wallingford Park Site Design
The design was created by Seattle landscape architect Karen Kiest after more than two years of community input directed by the parks department. The connecting space will be paid for by SPS as part of Hamilton’s renovation.
“Because of the way the school was being designed, it gave us the opportunity to address what to do with this area,” said Paula Hoff, a spokeswoman for Seattle Parks and Recreation, explaining that the property line between the park and the school was previously a street that was closed in 1970.
The closure split the right of way, giving half to the school district and the other half to the parks department. All of it was sitting on the school’s side of a fence. Some years later, local residents created a native, drought resistant community garden on the park’s side of the fence that they now maintain. When it came time to redevelop a connection between the park and the school, all three groups needed to come together to devise a plan.
“We came up with the best design to meet the school’s needs, the park’s needs and the community’s needs,” Hoff said. “It is a win, win, win.”
“We’re adjusting the grades to meet up with the park and providing an open connection between the park and school,” added Michael Romero, project manager for Hamilton’s renovation.
The new design allows children to continue to learn to ride their bikes on a paved school play space and gives the community 5,625 square feet of additional garden area to what’s now known as the sunken garden, he said. The community will also be able to use the new gym. Teachers and students can use the amphitheater, new garden area and park as an outdoor learning and performance space.
Many of the boulders brought in by the parks’ neighborhood gardeners will be used as seating in the new amphitheater, said Kiest, who added that additional boulders will be brought in to increase the seating to 60. The design also includes wheelchair access between Woodlawn and Densmore avenues and ADA access between the school and the playfield.
The new design will be constructed by Graham Contracting, which is the contractor for the Hamilton renovation.
After a collaborative effort between the community and Seattle Public Schools, a new design for the former Denny Middle School site has been prepared and the project is now moving into the permitting stage.
The new plan for the West Seattle 6-acre site was needed because Denny International Middle School is moving one block to the Chief Sealth High School campus.
Seattle Public Schools had several requirements for the site, including replacing a lost softball field and tennis courts at Chief Sealth due to the middle school move and reserving an open space in case the district needs an additional elementary school in the future. As a part of Seattle Public Schools’ Excellence for All strategic plan, SPS invited community members, including the Westbrook Neighborhood Council, to join the school design team, or SDT, to help create a plan for the new open site.
“The district wanted to invite the public to bring their ideas to the process because we wanted the neighborhood to use and enjoy the property,” said Don Gillmore, Seattle Public Schools Building Excellence Program Manager.
Through a series of open meetings, a core group of local residents, SPS team members and school officials participated in a “charrette” whereby three groups created different scenarios for the site. In a charrette, all interested parties take part in designing a space and bring forth their ideas for consideration and the parties collaborate to find a design. The charrette process was directed by Denny Middle School architect Bassetti Architects and landscape architect The Berger Partnership.
“We had several dedicated community members who worked hard, and we are very pleased with the results,” Gillmore said. “The result is that we’ve developed the land with a more park-like feel and less like an athletic facility.”
As part of the process, the Denny SDT traveled to various parks in the city to see how parks and open spaces were designed and to see what features might be incorporated into the former Denny property. It was the first school design team to tour parks to help create a school property design, Gillmore said.
The team then took that knowledge to the charette process where three sub groups were created and charged to come up with a design for consideration. They each started with the property’s requirements: a softball field, six tennis courts, an open space that could house a future 30,000 square-foot elementary school, and a
play space. They also had to take the site’s slope into account, incorporate a public pathway throughout the site that promotes circulation and include various access points.
“One of the largest challenges was to create various plateaus as the site includes a 50 foot drop from one end to the other,” Gillmore said. “It makes it a lot tougher to create a softball field and tennis courts.”
Community members were able to follow the process as the results of each meeting were posted to the BEX III web site pages that feature the various projects associated with the Denny Middle School and Chief Sealth High School redevelopment. The web pages can be found at http://bex. seattleschools.org/CSHSSDTMinutes. html. The site included charrette designs, meeting minutes and video presentations and welcomed community input.
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Proposed Denny Site Design
The resulting three designs located the softball field in roughly the same location, on the southwestern corner of the site. One team’s design included a small parking lot off of SW Cloverdale Street and spread the tennis courts all along the SW Thistle Street side of the site.
Each proposed design was then evaluated based upon established criteria and scored. The plan design receiving the highest score was then refined with input from the entire design team. Translated into final form by The Berger Partnership architects, the plan was then submitted to SPS and the community for review.
The design includes water bioswales, which help remove silt and pollution from surface runoff water; saves existing trees where possible; and protects sufficient open space for a future elementary school, Gillmore said. The design is within the $2 million the district budgeted for the site redevelopment and met the objectives of the BEX III bond, approved by the voters in February, 2007. This fall SPS and DKA, their construction manager, will begin the permit process.
Construction on the site would begin in April 2011 after permits are approved, and the park is scheduled to be completed by October, 2011.
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For additional information or questions regarding BEX III, please contact:
Pauline Sugarman
Community Outreach, Building Excellence Project - BEX III
(206) 658-2931
PaulineS@dkarch.com
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