Bricks, Mortar & Minds Encourage Learning By Giving Students Outstanding Facilities

Sat., Sept. 12, 1998

Elizabeth Payne Special To The Valley Voice

We have a moral obligation to provide children with schools which, by their very design, encourage students’ curiosity, focus and learning.

As voters in the Central Valley School District prepare to decide the $78 million bond measure on Tuesday, I hope they think about this concept: We can encourage learning through beautiful buildings and beautiful school grounds.

I think back to the old school buildings I attended. A lot of them were modeled on cathedrals, on buildings that made you aspire to glorious thoughts.

I remember walking down the tile halls of those buildings, thinking, “I can be anything I want to be.”

I go into the buildings we’ve built for our children in the last 30 years — you walk in and you’re presented with “the food court” or “the gym” or dark hallways lined with lockers.

You don’t walk in and say, “I can be anything I want to be.” You walk in and say, “Oh no, I have to go to school again today. And sit under flourescent lights.”

I remember the tile, the terra cotta, the high ceilings and clerestory windows. We have wonderful materials that we can use today, wonderful metals that we can use in sculptures. And I don’t think cost is the problem. I think it’s a matter of demanding creative solutions from our architects and our designers.

We can build facilities that inspire. Buildings that can enhance what our young people are trying to become.

Locker rooms can model professional locker rooms, so that young athletes work to be the best. Music pods can be accoustically designed, so that when a young person plays the violin, they have the right reverberations. The auditorium for debate can actually be a theater, and a child can fantisize about becoming a lawyer or a judge.

Buildings in the past, by their very design, could be recognized for what they were. So, instead of having a new school that looks like a mall, let’s have a new school that says “I’m a school,” not a generic building.

And when children walk in those doors, they’ll be prepared to go to school.

Our generation has seemed to be content to do no more than patch up the buildings we have inherited. It is time to build for the future.

For other views, see stories under same headline.

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