Buckeye holds visioning sessions to shape future facilities

YORK TWP. — Architecture firm GPD Group recently led visioning sessions with Buckeye Schools community members to determine what principles will shape new facilities within the district. GPD Group provided an update on the visioning sessions to the Buckeye Board of Education on Tuesday. Buckeye has a "self-funded" plan to build a new high school and turn the existing high school into a middle school. "A lot of the conversation in the room was about the wonderful things that are happening in Buckeye," Abby Rainieri from GPD Group said. "There were so many students at the session who were extremely impressive, very engaged. A lot of discussion was about tradition, history and pride and how do we honor that but also build toward the future." The visioning sessions took place over two days, she said. The first session focused on what is successful and challenging about the current high school, and the group drafted guiding principles for design. "We started crunching the data and understanding some of the things we heard in the first session to set the agenda for the second session," Rainieri said. "We reviewed those guiding principles, and we talked about how students might be organized in the new building. Then, we started getting into design patterns, which is the very beginning of thinking about how space can apply to some of the things we were talking about." The following guiding principles for design were established: Holistic safety and well-being. Engagement. Collaboration. Balanced identity between Buckeye's history and its future. Responsive comfort by providing a range of spaces to meet the needs of different students and space. Future opportunities for students. "As we move down the path, there might be times where there's things that are in conflict, competing priorities if you will," Rainieri said. "We're going to use this to help us through those moments in the design process." There was strong consensus on the following during the visioning sessions: The importance of the ninth grade year and building community early in the transition from junior high school to high school. Learning becoming more flexible and personalized as students move from ninth grade to 12th grade. Prioritizing agile spaces over larger classrooms. Having quiet spaces for students to focus on individualized learning. The value of natural light, welcoming entries and learning commons. "The (media center) is the one space that's got all this great natural light, so if this is the room you spend most of your time in, when you come to the high school, it doesn't seem so bad," Rainieri said. "This is the outlier space, so we got a lot of feedback from students about what it's like to be in a windowless room all day." The organizational direction for the high school focused on: Having upper grade levels organized through flexible learning hubs. Central community commons being the anchor or heart of the building. Spaces designed around purpose and adaptability. "Probably when they were designing this building 40, 50 years ago, it would have been kind of easy," Rainieri said. "We would know how many classrooms we needed, how many teachers we needed to support, and we would take the exact same classroom and stamp it out up and down the hallway. All the information about how learning is happening now and especially how it's happening in the future, really points to the need to think about how we're organizing different types of spaces." Moving forward, students will answer questions about student experience and lockers through surveys, she said. "(Lockers are) a very important thing that could potentially take up a lot of real estate costs and cost a lot of wall space that could be utilized for other things in the building," Rainieri said. "We want to understand how students are using their lockers." A communitywide survey will also be sent out asking for visual preferences to help the firm start determining what the building actually looks like, she said. "As architects, we don't necessarily have a style or a visual kind of language," Rainieri said. "We really think that the architecture should reflect the communities in which it lives." Aaron Rodebaugh from GPD Group said the firm will take the data from the visioning report as the project enters the schematic design phase. In this phase, there will be more talk about building systems and visual preferences. "Ultimately, our schematic design due date is the end of June," he said. "Then, we'll be investigating at that point to make sure we have the pencils down moment and gather ourselves to make sure we're on budget." For more information on facilities at Buckeye Local Schools, visit tinyurl.com/5vv64tyr. Contact reporter Madisyn Woodring at (330) 721-4049 or mwoodring@medina-gazette.com.