July School Visit

I got a chance to visit a school in New Jersey with my colleagues at the EdLab in July. The school was reconstructed from a chocolate factory. The new space is featured with a roof garden and its "green" utilization of the old resources. How to work "greenly", eat "greenly", and design "greenly" is one of main focuses of the school curriculum.









An Integrated School Curriculum on History, Ecology, and Space

One of the main questions we brought with us during the visit was: How do environments/spaces influence teaching and learning at St. Philip's? As introduced by Ralph, the main designer and member of the school board, the school believes in a school curriculum built on student-centered real-life experiences. The redesigned space and the “green roof” extend the school’s options in its curricular development. It integrates the following curricular focuses (from space redesign) into teaching and learning:

History

The display of new interior design and elements of old building (i.e., an old chocolate factory) gives teachers a curricular focus on the history of Newark as a major industrial zone in the East Coast. Students will be able to reflect on the history through their daily hands-on experiences in the space.

Ecology and Sustainability
The new space lets students learn about how to utilize old buildings and how to work “green”. The design utilizes as many old resources as possible, including ceilings, walls (of the stairways), and old desks and chairs. It also pays attention to energy saving devices. Every classroom is installed with sensored lights and there is a solar-energy panel on top of the school which provides a small portion of energy for the building.

“Green Roof” Integration
“Green roof”, the school’s roof garden, is integrated to most of the academic subjects, including math, science, literacy, and social studies. Every class has got a spot on the roof and they do seeding, planting, and harvesting there. Lower-grade students use the garden to learn counting and recording numbers, while higher-grade students can learn and write about biological life cycles and geographical origins of the plants.

Nutrition
Meals served by the school’s dinning room are connected to the “green roof”, too. During the harvest season, students eat food from the garden and learn about nutrition as well as how to eat “green”. The nutrition program has a big impact on students’ lives, as told by Charity, students take “green” ideas home and “teach” their parents how to eat healthy.

Aesthetics, Design and Engineering
The color scheme of the school is “From Earth to Sky”, with each floor assigned with a main different color ranging from light yellow (earth) to light blue (sky). The redesigned space (with all the details in colors, interior display, and ecological devices) gives students a great opportunity to learn about aesthetics, design, as well as engineering from the angel of how to work “green” -- How to design a new space from an old building, how to do “green” interior design, how to match colors, how to design and put energy saving devices within the building?

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More School Information

History of Newark Schools
As introduced by Ralph, Newark is a traditional industrial zone. Almost 85% of the products of the East Coast are produced from this city. However, the public school system failed in the last 40 years, thus a huge number of private and charter schools have been established. The neighborhood of St. Philips is close to Hispanic town. The neighborhood is also one of the roughest areas in western New Jersey. It gets high racial attention and a high need for new schools. The new St. Philips is located close to three higher education institutions (e.g., Rutgers and NJIT) for the purpose of getting the resources of those institutions’ secondary-school support. The location of St. Philips housed a chocolate factory and the school design started about three years ago.

School Information
St. Philips was established in 1988 with a first-grade class. In the recent 20 years, it has relocated three times from downtown area to a small piece of land close to Newark Museum before moving to the current “warehouse”. “It has tripled the size where we came from”, as introduced by Ralph. Currently it is a private k-8 school, with two classes per grade and 18 students per class. Though as a private school, it grants scholarships/financial aid to about 60% of its student population. The school’s ethnic information shows that 96% of the students are African American students, while Asian, Hispanic, and Caucasian American students constitute the rest of the student group. Most students are from lower or lower-middle socioeconomic classes.

Admission
The admissions are considered for families in need, as given by Ralph, the school believes that the admissions should consider more about students who can take the ability to learn rather than students with parents have the ability to pay. Besides, potential students need to go through a testing process. For younger students, the test is relatively subjective, while for older students, there are entrance tests prepared for them. As further introduced, most of the St. Philip’s graduates have been doing well in their high schools. For example, 80% of them take advanced math courses in the first year of high school.

School Redesign
The process of school redesign has involved Ralph and the main administrators of the school since January 2007.

Technology
Every classroom has a projector, a desktop computer, a SmartBoard, and a stereo radio/CD player. However, there is no separate media lab or computer lab at the school.

A Tour with a Group of High School Students
We were touring around the school with a group of 11 local high school students. We noticed that though students asked limited questions, but the garden and the gym were the places where students frequently talked to each other and raised the most questions (to Ralph). The following may reflect the part of school redesign that interests them most:

• “Did you get a good pay as a designer?”
• “How much is the project?”
• “Can the building be fully solar powered?”
• “What is the cost for electronic coil?”
• “Does every floor have a restroom?”
• “What is the cost of the grass?”
• …

Students seemed very interested in Ralph’s job, they asked several repeated questions about it at different places. However, when Ralph asked them about their future job plans, most students said they were not certain and only 1-2 of them answered that they would be interested in getting a job related to sustainability and environment. This observation indicates that students are interested/concerned about getting jobs, and education of design, sustainability and ecology at local high schools is to a large degree ignored.