Architecture Firm Helps Schools Plan Their Futures

By Angela Tablac, St. Louis Post-Dispatch

Apr. 22–School districts and their administrators don’t have crystal balls to predict how much their student bodies will grow in the next five, 10 or 20 years and how many classrooms will be needed. So it can be difficult to gauge things like whether a growing district should build a new high school or just add to a existing building.

Yet Wm. B. Ittner Inc. — an architecture firm in downtown St. Louis that specializes in planning and designing elementary, middle and high schools — says it’s taking the guesswork out of school-facility planning.

It developed and uses a software program called Solutions, which estimates how many classrooms will be needed to accommodate the number of students at a given time.

The program isn’t meant to project student enrollment; a demographer is needed to get the most accurate glimpse of how much a district or school’s student body will increase or decrease in the future.

But after the demographers have done their jobs, “our software is right on the money with the types of rooms” and the numbers of rooms needed to fit all of those students, said Dennis Young, Ittner’s president and chief executive.

School boards can use the data generated by Ittner to determine their schools’ sizes and decide whether they have enough space or need to build more.

The software is more critical for high schools than elementary or middle schools, said C. Kenneth Tanner, a University of Georgia professor of engineering and education. That’s because each high school student attends multiple classrooms every day, said Tanner, who studies school architecture and planning. Figuring out the number of classrooms needed in five or 10 years for those students poses a big challenge.

The Solutions program is designed precisely for those complicated projects, Young said. Ittner has used the software in about half of its work, or about 300 projects since 1980, when the first version of the software was developed. The cost for clients is built into Ittner’s consulting fee.

Young plans to launch an online version of Solutions in June that will allow Ittner’s clients to log in and view the analyses.

To use the program as a planning tool, a school or district needs to provide Ittner with some information: the last two or three years of student enrollment by grade, courses offered and the number of students in each course. Ittner’s team of three educational facility planning specialists enters the data into the software’s spreadsheets, and the Solutions software generates reports that include:

— A master plan that includes the number of rooms and the types of rooms needed, like a math classroom or a science lab, for each year.

— The square footage of each classroom in the master plan.

— How many teachers and non-faculty staff members, like janitors, will be needed each year.

— The cost of the project being considered.

Because the program functions like a complex calculator, Ittner and its clients can substitute numbers to see how a change in, for example, the student-to-teacher ratio would affect the number of needed classrooms.

That ability to tinker with numbers helps districts in their planning process, said Darcy Benway, superintendent of O’Fallon Township High School District 203 in O’Fallon, Ill.

About 2,300 students were enrolled in the high school in 2004, but the building was designed to hold just 2,000 to 2,100 students, Benway said. The district wanted to build a second high school, but a bond referendum for $52.3 million failed in 2004.

Plans then changed to a $37.5 million ninth-grade center that could expand into that second school. Voters approved a plan for the 145,000-square-foot building about a year ago.

The program “helps educators to make data-driven decisions,” said Benway, whose district hired Ittner to plan and design a new building. “It allows you to do what-if analysis.”

atablac@post-dispatch.com — 314-340-8140

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