New Schools for Older Neighborhoods: Strategies for Building Our Communities’ Most Important Assets

Open a new school in a retail mall, build an apartment complex to finance school renovations, keep the school open while rebuilding on-site, target a magnet-school design for a densely populated neighborhood, forge a coalition with the local university and philanthropic organizations. These are just a few of the innovative approaches some communities have taken to create good new schools in existing neighborhoods.

Over the next decade, we need to build thousands of schools due to deteriorating facilities and increasing numbers of students. While improving our educational system, these new schools in already developed areas can also improve our neighborhoods by helping them become more compact, livable and walkable.

As with other challenges, however, communities face many barriers to building schools in existing neighborhoods. The following case studies highlight how five communities – in big cities and small towns – overcame these obstacles and illustrate the creativity that people across the nation have brought to this task of creating new schools in older neighborhoods.

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New Schools for Older Neighborhoods: Strategies for Building Our Communities’ Most Important Assets  PDF, 2.9 MB

Published: January 2002
Pages: 24