School Districts require a lot of coordination to make their multi-sports programs work seamlessly. For a while now, adding an auxiliary gymnasium onto the school building or a wrestling practice room that can double as a cheerleading practice space, has been the answer to make room for all teams to have needed practice space. Now, School Administrators are discovering that Athletic Fieldhouses, if they have space within their campus, are a better choice because they offer more flexibility for students and their community.

Maximize Funds and Improve Student/Staff Safety

2022 and 2023 K-12 school remodeling is about maximizing funds and improving communicable and physical safety of the students and staff. Right now, schools have an opportunity to spend government funds to help their schools be safer through ESSER Funds. Safer is subjective or flexible to what is more pressing in a District, whether it is cleaner indoor air, reconfigured space or furniture for social distancing,

What Is Constructability Review?

There are so many decisions to make as schools get back to in-person learning and doing everything they can to make school safer, catch students up from remote learning, and expand mental health accommodations, among other needs. School leaders, administrators, and teachers have so much on their plates, oh, and are also dealing with volatile views from parents about how to handle it all.

School Districts are facing pressure to incorporate technology into their curriculum to compete with other institutions who have already adopted 21^st Century and New Tech programs. However, miles of wiring, hardware, software, white boards, wireless projectors and hand held devices aren’t the only technological concerns of modern schools.

What do a pea, a quarter, a mothball, and a golf ball have in common? You probably guessed it, they are all used to describe sizes of hail. The bigger the diameter of hail, the bigger the damage it causes, especially for School Districts. You may wonder why a school would be worse off than most other structures, but when you consider that most Districts have a campus with multiple buildings in the same area, the cost to restore after a hail storm can add up quickly.

At the 2018 FIRST Robotics World Championships in Detroit, there were 601 teams from Michigan. To say that robotics is growing quickly is an understatement. Through grants, bond programs, and sponsorships, Michigan School Districts are making room on their campuses to support those teams. The makerspace, as these rooms are more broadly called, can include a robotics lab. These areas are “dependent on the size of the robotics involved”, according to Douglas Rich of spaces4learning.com in his article, Designing Robotics Labs.   “There is no difference between learning to program a demonstration robot or full-size robotics arm; so many schools choose the smaller robots to save space and money”.

Construction Management is the ideal delivery method for large, complex construction projects, such as those for School Districts.  School Boards and Superintendents rely on their Architect and Construction Manager (CM) to form dynamic teams to fulfill a project’s goals and seamlessly deliver their buildings on time and within budget.  Team cohesion is the goal on each of our projects. Taking into consideration that we are possibly working with new and diverse players with each new School District, this takes effort and coordination to achieve.  An experienced CM typically will have vast resources and relationships with a wide variety of Prime Contractors, but when bidding projects, an unfamiliar contractor may be more suitable in achieving the schedule, budget, or meet proximity requirements of local contractor, therefore, we have tools that we use to initiate them onto the team as a cohesive member.