When the roughly 500 elementary students at Hawthorn Elementary in Vernon Hills, Ill., a suburb about 40 miles northwest of Chicago, return to classes next fall, they’ll be warmly embraced by a building sporting new floor-to-ceiling glass art, colorful hallways, and abstract artificial tree canopies hovering over the schoolyard.
They’ll also be returning to an educational environment challenged, changed, and re-imagined due to the once-in-a-generation pandemic that will continue to resonate throughout classrooms and hallways for years. In December, American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry president Yiu Kee Warren Ng said the nation’s children were “in the deep end of a mental health crisis,” an alarming escalation of the organization’s October declaration of a national emergency for children’s mental health.
Hawthorn Elementary, redesigned in the midst of the pandemic, is the first of many attempts to alter the built environment to address this crisis. The updated layout and look, designed by Legat Architects, is the first of many pandemic-era redesigns the district will undertake with the lessons of COVID-19 and classrooms top of mind, according to LeeAnn Taylor, assistant superintendent of finance and operations for the local school district. Educators, architects, and parents focused on color theory, flexible space, sensory space, and the need for areas where students can step away for a moment and regroup.
“We’re definitely thinking about how our spaces can support kids and what they need to be successful,” Taylor said. “Some of them are fearful of coming to school, and some of the kindergarten students didn’t have preschool, so they’re really coming here and learning to play and interact with each other, after a lack of interaction with other students.”
Few spaces in society went under the microscope of pandemic-era public opinion like schools. And while in many cases battles over masks and mandates will persist, perhaps the most lasting long-term impact will be how the stresses and challenges of remote learning will contribute to a rethinking and reshaping of what schools look like in the future.
Cost-effective, innovative interventions, like those sweeping the hospital and mental health care fields, are in high demand, according to architects and school officials involved in planning and executing renovations and designs for new schools. The once-in-a-generation experience with COVID-19 may create a similarly unique opening to rethink the physical dimensions of education.
“Before the pandemic, during design workshops, teachers and administrators would say, ‘Oh, no way, we can’t do that, we can’t change this,’” said Robin Randall, AIA, director of Legat’s pre-K–12 education team. “Then the pandemic happened, and boy, did we have to change. But now we know we can change, and it’s been dramatic.”
Changes in attitudes, and appropriations, may overlap at a crucial moment. California alone is spending billions of dollars to improve and expand mental health facilities in schools, expanding the network of wellness centers found in some cities, and the American Rescue Plan Act of 2021 includes roughly $4 billion that can be spent on mental health. While many classrooms likely will receive new HVAC systems or overdue capital investments, Taylor and others say that going forward, a focus on student mental wellness will more directly influence design and architectural decisions, even for previously budgeted projects (the Hawthorn renovation was approved in 2018).
Expanding schools of thought around wellness, as well as trends toward more open and inclusive classrooms, have been advancing similar adjustments and additions to educational buildings for years. The larger hope for advocates is that the mental health strain of the pandemic and remote learning will result in a greater appreciation for the value of well-designed facilities for students, as well as a social commitment to fund and refurbish often poorly maintained facilities.
“We’ve learned how important school is for socialization,” Randall said. “Kids started falling through the cracks when it was all virtual. People are much more aware of their environment and how it affects them. In the past, athletics has driven a lot of decisions about the educational environment. And now we’re seeing more prioritization of emotional learning and wellness.”
Currently engaged in numerous designs and redesigns for educational clients, Legat has been advocating for a number of updates and alterations to reflect the lessons of recent years. Library design focuses more on hangout space, leaning more toward a hands-on classroom, creative studio, and even STEM lab, with areas for private and small-group interactions.
Across classrooms and activity spaces, more room is being made for pullout spaces to allow kids to withdraw or have spontaneous socialization. Social service spaces have received more emphasis as part of broader circulation plans. Legat has found a consistent demand from schools asking for sleep pods, or additional space for cots in nurses’ offices, as areas to rest or escape ever-present screens.
Outdoor learning, which emerged, often ad-hoc, as a key element of pandemic-era health and safety adjustments, has also been emphasized, with budget-friendly projects such as embellished courtyards providing fast-and-easy new learning environments.
Taylor, of the Hawthorn district, said there’s been a sense of whiplash as design trends have conflicted with health and safety requirements. Prior to the pandemic, the movement was toward eliminating desks and introducing flexible furniture; Taylor recalls conducting a study a few years ago that found the average second grader was at their desk just 30% of the day. Today, while adaptability remains a focus, there needs to be a new focus on spacing and separation.
The new Hawthorn Elementary, originally built in 1986, has been reworked by Legat to include more abundant natural light via clerestories and window walls, and a focus on healing spaces, including a new fitness area and sensory therapy space. Taylor said a key request was less institutional common spaces.
“We need to make our community spaces feel more welcoming,” she said. “In the libraries, we have little nooks for people to read a book quietly. We can’t assume everybody wants to be socializing all the time. We need to meet kids where they’re at. We’re looking beyond the class.”
These types of changes ultimately benefit the equity mission inherent in education. Throughout the pandemic, as altered routines changed commutes and access to schools and socialization, existing inequities around class and income were amplified, according to Layla McKay, director of the Centre for Urban Design and Mental Health.
“During the pandemic, people went from vaguely thinking that perhaps mental health might be linked in some way to the built environment to having this real personal sense of how that came about. And that gave permission for innovation.”
For many architects and designers focused on education, a greater connection to the outdoors and renewed focus on indoor-outdoor spaces and functional landscapes have become not just battletested means of continuing education during the pandemic, but proven ways to improve mental health and connection for students. Simply opening schools to more views of the outdoors can have significant impacts; researchers at the University of Illinois have collected voluminous evidence that rooms with views of trees and the outdoors increase student performance and decrease anxiety.
In many ways, landscape architects have long led the charge for this kind of design, especially during the pandemic. In 2020, a cadre of Bay Area organizations— Green Schoolyards America; The Lawrence Hall of Science at University of California, Berkeley; the Ten Strands nonprofit; and the San Mateo County Office of Education— created the National COVID-19 Outdoor Learning Initiative, which has garnered national media attention and become a clearinghouse for ideas and innovations. Sharon Danks, who runs the Green Schoolyards America program, estimated interest in outdoor learning exploded by a factor of 20 during the last two years.
“Most schools across the country are underperforming in terms of their campus grounds and buildings,” said Claire Latane, a landscape architect and author of Schools That Heal. “And it’s not strictly an urban issue, or an issue at one level of schools. Elementary schools, middle schools, high schools: they all could do so much better in terms of bringing nature into children’s lives on a daily basis.”
Latane spearheaded a redesign of her child’s elementary school playground in the Los Angeles Eagle Rock neighborhood, completed in 2016, replacing a completely paved landscape with grassy knolls and oak trees. The comparatively modest $350,000 investment increased prosocial behavior by 40% to 50%, according to a Occidental College study. The results follow decades of research into the potential for healing spaces, such as Roger Ulrich’s pioneering research into hospital rooms in the 1980s. But the pandemic, and the sounding of alarm bells by teachers and psychiatrists around student mental health, may fast-track such design thinking into schools. Latane hopes pioneering examples, such as Environmental Charter School in Lawndale, Calif., which boasts a living stream and native fruit trees, will become more commonplace.
“With skyrocketing levels of student anxiety and stress and depression, and increasing suicide rates, the need for healing environments that bring them together and provide a sense of belonging and a sense of community is just way overdue,” Latane said.
Traditionally, it’s been a challenge turning plans into action at schools, since work tends to happen on a multiyear timeframe. But Latane believes that can work to advocates’ advantage now, with billions of dollars funneled toward schools and relatively small, cost-effective solutions offering extensive benefits. The “programmatic and scheduling nightmares” handed to schools during COVID-19 have left teachers and principals overwhelmed and burnt out. Governments and architects need to step in with plans and funding and consider turning schools into better community hubs.
“We’re looking for a quick fix to upend a hundreds-year-long academic system,” Latane said. “How do you start changing that overnight? The more we can provide places that are meaningful and promote a sense of ‘this is my school, a beautiful, healthy, nurturing environment,’ the more connected those students will feel to these places, and they’ll keep that connection throughout their lifetimes.”
Taylor believes adaptability will always be at the center of school design, both in anticipation of future pandemics or events that may require great flexibility, and to meet the needs of teachers and emerging technology.
“It’s important within this mental health discussion that we make sure facilities are supportive of teacher needs,” she said. “We need to do things to attract people to this profession. What will education look like in the future? We need to think of school outside of school, so to speak.”
