What Makes an IDL School?

What makes an IDL school?

And not just an ideal school, but one in NYC where smaller neighborhood schools are not common enough. Not anymore. Once schools could be 4 or 5 stories, 20,000 sf and still have that sense of monumentality in a human scaled community.

Traditional NYC schools, like NYC brownstones, were once designed with a particular kind of genius. The brownstone is so beautifully structured that it can survive centuries of change in the world and remain usable and relevant. The rooms are easy to reassign, redesign, combine or divide. A brownstone can serve one family or many. The two-bay design (narrow for stairs and smaller rooms, wider for the main rooms) provides a variety of spaces to fill a variety of needs.

The same is true with the NYC school typology; infinitely malleable because it is so precisely structured, so refined and well thought out. Usually centered around a set of matching classrooms front and back, with a generous hall in between. Stairs, often separated by gender or by direction (up and down), bookend the wide hall and are usually naturally lighted. It’s a pattern that works and, like the city grid itself, can be infinitely adapted to modern needs.  

But schools haven’t been made that way for decades. Rethinking that base typology, the classic NYC public school, is what we took on for a NYC charter school. Charter Schools are public schools, and the very best of them are laboratories for how to fix the public school system. They are politically challenged, mostly by teacher’s unions and our current mayor who argue that ALL schools should get the benefit of the higher quality education some charters offer.

Who could argue with that, but isn’t that an argument FOR the charter school as laboratory of ideas for NYC? It is not the case that stopping charter schools will improve the NYC school system, but it is the fact that eliminating them will deny some students of the education they all deserve.

It’s quite a different matter from school vouchers, that seek to sap the funding of public schools and divert it to alternate educational systems with unregulated ideological curricula. Charter schools operate with the same per child funding that all the public schools have, and are often co-located in NYC public schools, using some of the 150,000 empty classrooms in the system.

But whatever one thinks of charter schools, or the NYC public school system, there is little doubt that the physical infrastructure is both critical and critically underperforming in most public schools. The one area where charter schools may have a financial advantage is in the funding of classroom design and construction, often money raised by the charter school board that exceeds typical investments.

But every time a dollar is spent on a co-located classroom for a charter school EVERY school in that building gets matching funds from the city and state. It’s an insane waste in an attempt to be even-handed and fair; a charter school raises, say, a million dollars to rebuild 20 classrooms to fit their pedagogical needs and the rest of the building, usually hundreds of classrooms, is showered with millions in matching funds that they are completely unprepared to spend wisely. The result is a waste of critical resources and restrictions on the charter school to avoid the need for matching funds. It’s all part of the ‘you can’t do that because it makes us look bad’ approach that NYC employs for charter school co-locations.

For that reason some charter schools prefer to build outside the typical installed base of empty NYC classrooms. And it is in this context that we propose a new kind of stand-alone school; small, nimble, easy to build and replicate, with the same sense of neighborhood monumentality that all NYC schools once displayed.

The IDL School

The Ideal (IDL) school is an idea that can be accordioned to fit a variety of NYC lot sizes, which typically fit within the modules of the 200’ wide block and 100’ foot deep lot. Every space from the ground floor up has access to light, views and air (a simple idea from a time before air conditioning and effective electric lighting). The school is a secure, and securable, place without being a fortress; a need that was not so common in the early 20^th century, but a critical part of any school design today. And because of the modest scale the school doesn’t require banks of escalators or elevators to get students to and from classrooms; the generously proportioned stairs act as a social mixer and exercise routine in one!