Better Learning Podcast Episode 201: Addressing a Multi-Billion Dollar Challenge

In the latest episode of the Better Learning Podcast, host Kevin Stoller dives into a thought-provoking discussion with experts Bruce Levine, Sean O'Donnell, and Heather Jauregui on the profound connection between education and design. The episode unpacks how collaboration between architects and educators can reshape school environments, positively influencing student outcomes and community engagement.

Takeaways:

• Education policy and design can significantly impact student outcomes.
• Collaboration between architects and educators is essential for effective school design.
• Indoor environmental quality (IEQ) plays a crucial role in student comfort and performance.
• Modernized schools positively influence community perception and engagement.
• Investment in school facilities is an investment in the future of communities.
• Research supports the connection between school design and educational outcomes.
• Schools should be designed to be inviting and supportive learning environments.
• Advocating for funding is critical to improving educational facilities.

Bruce Levine, J.D., from Drexel University, highlights the role of education policy and design in shaping the future of communities. Sean O'Donnell, of Perkins Eastman, sees schools as the heart of community life, advocating for the integration of civic architecture with sustainable, high-performing design. Heather Jauregui adds to the conversation with her passion for sustainability, emphasizing how the wellness of students and the planet are intertwined in the design of resilient schools.

The impact of modernized versus non-modernized schools, drawing from the Latrobe research study: https://perkinseastman.com/white-papers/addressing-a-multi-billion-dollar-challenge/

Sound Bites:

"My school experience is different than what I aspire to create."

"Schools are community assets."

Follow Bruce Levine on Social Media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bruce-a-levine-91667b6/

Follow Sean O'Donnell on Social Media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sean-odonnell-faia-leed-ap-perkinseastman/

Follow Heather Jauregui on Social Media:

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/heather-jauregui-61929269/

Learn More About Perkins Eastman:

Website: https://www.mpsaz.org/

Learn more about creating better learning environments at www.Kay-Twelve.com.

Kevin Stoller is the host of the Better Learning Podcast and Co-Founder of Kay-Twelve, a national leader for educational furniture. Find out more about Kevin at https://www.linkedin.com/in/kevinstoller/.

For more episodes of the Better Learning Podcast, visit https://www.betterlearningpodcast.com/

Episode 201 of the Better Learning Podcast

Kevin Stoller is the host of the Better Learning Podcast and Co-Founder of Kay-Twelve, a national leader for educational furniture. Learn more about creating better learning environments at www.Kay-Twelve.com.

For more information on our partners:

Association for Learning Environments (A4LE) - https://www.a4le.org/

Education Leaders' Organization - https://www.ed-leaders.org/

Second Class Foundation - https://secondclassfoundation.org/

EDmarket - https://www.edmarket.org/

Catapult @ Penn GSE - https://catapult.gse.upenn.edu/

Want to be a Guest Speaker? Request on our website

Transcript

Transcript:

Kevin Stoller (05:25.33)
It's another episode of the Better Learning Podcast. This show is all about trying to break down the silos of education so that we can, we can show a best for the next generation. Really the goal of this is to figure out how we can, how we can create better learning environments, how we can create better learning outcomes. But always keeping that student at the center of trying to figure out what is the best for every kid and the topic today is going to be is going to really dig into some of the research and have some different perspectives in here. So I'm excited about the conversation and I'm going to pull in Sean O'Donnell. Let's start with you, Sean, and then I'll bring in Heather and Bruce so we can let the audience figure out each other, everyone's voice on there. Sean, how are you doing?

Sean O'Donnell (06:23.372)
I'm doing well. Thanks for asking, Kevin. How are you?

Kevin Stoller (06:26.822)
Good. So we just established all the three of you are in DC and in Arizona. So you guys are at the end of a long day. And so I appreciate you going later. I introduced Heather, Sean, why don't you give just a quick idea of what school was like for you? I like hearing the setup because it gives a little bit of background of each guest before we dig into the talk.

Sean O'Donnell (06:53.274)
I thought we weren't asking hard questions, but I had an interesting conversation with the head of school down in Guatemala, and she said something like, I didn't really like school. And from the head of school, that was kind of surprising to me. But I could relate as I went to a very traditional old-line religious high school. So it was very conservative and so I think it was very different than many environments that we're creating today that are maybe more progressive and cross-curricular and arts-based and...

So I have to say I agree with the head of school that my experience is perhaps different than what I aspire to create for students today. So like I said, it's a hard question, but I think my ambition as a school designer is to create places that are joyful, inspiring, full of energy was not necessarily my experience as a student, if that answers your question.

Kevin Stoller (08:17.236)
Yeah, that does not sound atypical. So yeah, I think a lot of us get in here like, wow, we can do this better. The first is what my experience was. Heather, meant to ask you before, but why don't you say your last name too, so I don't screw it up and then give a little bit of your answer as well.

Heather Jauregui (08:35.783)
Sure, yeah, so I'm Heather Halregui. You don't have to, it's not written anything like it sounds, so no shame for not being able to pronounce that. I guess my school experience, like thinking back on it, I, and this is going to kind of segue into a part of what I'm passionate and we'll talk more about as a part of the study, but I don't ever remember being able to see outside.

I remember being very disconnected and like I would go into my classroom environments and it was very insular. There was maybe a kind of door or a window to the outside, but it was often closed and shut off. And it was of that time where, you know, views and daylight and even things like that were seen as almost a distraction to the learning environment instead of an enhancement. So I think that, yeah, that's one thing that rings a bell to me is that

I remember just going inside school and then never leaving and kind of being trapped, not trapped, but feeling like I was a little bit confined within that learning environment.

Kevin Stoller (09:41.832)
Yeah, yeah. All right, Bruce, your turn here.

Bruce Levine (09:45.366)
Okay, you want me to pronounce my last name? Okay, Levine, and good to be here. So my experience, I went to a pretty progressive, highly thought of public school system. But what was particularly unique about my experience, and I'm a little older than all of you, is that my town was the first one in the United States

Kevin Stoller (09:48.176)
Yes.

Bruce Levine (10:13.23)
to actually decide to voluntarily bus students for integration. So when I was in third grade, they started this experiment of busing essentially black kids from one part of town all over the rest of the town. And then for sixth grade, all of us went to a central sixth grade, which was in the black section of town for lack of a better way to describe it. But what that did is it made me very aware of education policy and issues at a very young age because as you can imagine, there was a lot of controversy, a lot of reporting around it. And that kind of stuck with me through a career that took me into a lot of different professional areas, but ultimately led me to be in the School of Education at Drexel and then eventually to connect with Heather and Sean.

Kevin Stoller (11:04.596)
You just set that up perfectly. Why don't you guys talk about how the three of you did connect and and set up? Yeah, set up a little bit of the history of the project you guys worked on

Sean O'Donnell (11:16.794)
Well, Heather and I know each other through the firm, of course, and Heather can tell that story perhaps, but I can start on the connection between Bruce and I. Bruce had run into one of our colleagues down at the wharf, which if you've been to DC is a major urban development, know, sort of transforming a large stretch of the waterfront that Perkins Eastman had done the master plan and the number of buildings for. And Bruce is very active in the community. Sorry for talking about Bruce here. But he ran into a colleague of ours at, I guess it was one of the opening celebrations for phase one. And they had started talking about other things that Perkins Eastman was doing. our colleague mentioned that we were interested in school design and Bruce had mentioned that he's the faculty of Drexel's department, our school of education. so the putting two and two together, our colleague recommended that we get together. Bruce and I had lunch one day just to start a conversation. If there was any, know, consistency between our interests in the built environment and education. And turns out we both resonated, I think, really strongly around this idea that there was a potential for collaboration between the School of Education and our architecture firm to really dig more deeply into how design can truly enhance educational outcomes. And with that, we started to just kick around ideas. Well, this is exciting. How would we actually work together on something? And turns out the Latrobe Prize from the AIA's College of Fellows had just opened their call for proposals.

Sean O'Donnell (13:31.712)
And so just throwing some preposterous idea on the table, I said, why don't we actually pursue this? It would be an earth-shattering opportunity for us to really dig into these issues. And we did. And long story short, surprisingly, we won it. So that's really how our collaboration started.

But Heather, you might want to embellish the larger team and collaboration that you've been part of as well.

Heather Jauregui (14:11.0)
Yeah, yeah, and just from my perspective, so I'm the director of sustainability for Perkins Eastman. So I actually, in my role, serve all of the offices and practice areas that Perkins Eastman works in as an architecture firm. So when I first started years ago at Perkins Eastman, at that time, we were already fairly progressive and wanting to make significant progress around sustainability within school design. So that's when Sean and I got really connected on that front, but also I think there was like this overlapping and kind of intersecting opportunity where we had just opened one of the highest performing Lead for Schools projects in the world, Dunbar Senior High School. And Sean wanted to, like within the first year of opening that project had significant achievements. So we saw increase in test scores. We saw, you know, improvements across a variety of different indicators.

And Sean wanted to do a more extensive kind of post-occupancy evaluation. And that really led us down this snowballing kind of pathway of studies where we were like, clearly high performance design has an impact on student outcomes. And we want to get more proof behind this and dig more into this. So that led to kind of a series of subsequent studies of increasing scale that ultimately got us to where we are today with Latrobe.

Sean O'Donnell (15:38.85)
And Bruce, maybe you want to talk about the aspect that your expertise really brought to the table. Because part of what we were doing through these studies that Heather had indicated is expanding our sort of model of the learning environment. So we started in many ways with IEQ and then we talked about expanding into what we call educational adequacy.

Bruce really brought the third leg of the stool together for us. Bruce, maybe you want to talk about that part.

Bruce Levine (16:15.982)
Yeah. Yeah, no. So one of the things that interested me about working with Perkins Eastman was that I recognized after my conversation with Sean over lunch that very little attention has been paid, relatively speaking, to the whole environment in which a lot of the education that my colleagues and I study and teach about occurs. And so what it also tied into, and I think what Sean is alluding to is the fact that I spent several years at that point researching the community school model and integrated student support strategies as something that I viewed as a very positive move in this country towards addressing a number of equity and other challenges. And so my belief was that schools, the physical structure of a school and its surrounding grounds, could be an important piece of turning schools into as much of a community asset as they could possibly be. And so it was an interesting symbiotic relationship between a lot of what I had been looking at and what I recognized was very much at the core of how Sean and his colleagues were looking at schools. So it really came together. And in fact, my dean at the time, agreed to allow us to create a platform called the Consortium for Design and Education Outcome. I mean, it's based at Drexel, but really what it is, it was an opportunity for myself and some other colleagues with a similar interest to collaborate with Perkins Eastman and have a base from which to conduct conversations, conduct research, go after funding, and really try to extend the body of knowledge around some of these things that we're all interested in.

Kevin Stoller (18:17.592)
One of the things for me is being involved with this is we see it. we see schools around the country and we see the difference. It's really easy to like walk in and be like, wow, something different is happening here. This is more engaging. Like we can physically just like see the difference versus the way it was like when we went to school. And the hard part is to really explain it to other people who may not be in schools every day like us to do that. What were those things that you intuitively knew that, but you really wanted to take the research and say, these are the measurements that I want to go and I want to either validate something that you kind of already know or to be able to say, like, I don't know the answers here. What was the basis or the measurements that you were out to find from this?

Sean O'Donnell (19:17.826)
Maybe I can tell you a little bit of a story as to how we started actually, which is echoing what Heather just said. We had finished a high school here in Washington and as it was concluding, we were completing our lead checklists and the like and we went down to the bottom of the tally and it was 91 credits and I happened to just offhandedly say in the meeting, I think, that sounds like a lot. does that compare to others? And it turns out it was the highest scoring building within the lead for school system in the world. And so that became a bit of a talking point with the client. They were very excited about that because what they were trying to do was transform the learning environment in DC, which had been historically in a very poor state of repair. So here now was a building that was on the sort of opposite end of the scale by some measures. And so people got excited about that and started celebrating it. But at one point, one of the city councilors at the time, said, can we afford to build the best or the highest scoring lead for schools project in the world? And I think everybody was shocked by that, right? Because what really was a celebration that they had actually created what we consider a high performance learning environment in many ways.

And to Heather's point, the test scores started improving, graduation rates started improving, enrollment started improving. So our real mission was to make the connection between those two points, right? Here is a very sustainable high-performance learning environment, and now these outcomes are starting to improve. So how do we connect the dots and actually demonstrate to people that the environment was part of the enhanced performance. So that's what we've been doing for 10 years is simply trying to connect those dots. So how do we get there? You know, again, we started with investments into teacher satisfaction, user satisfaction, pre and post occupancy analyses through a series of significant projects for us. But that led to a nine school study across DC, again on those factors and Heather can fill in the details. But then the question was where do we go from there and how do we expand that model so that we have really a truly comprehensive model of the learning environment. So again, it's IEQ educational adequacy and what we call community connectivity and all the many facets that we could dig down into each of those buckets. Hopefully that's answered your question.

Kevin Stoller (22:36.73)
Yeah, yeah, Heather, tell me, mean, what were the things for you that stood out? You're like, now I can actually see it in the data here. I saw the story, but now the data is telling either more to the story or a different story.

Heather Jauregui (22:51.674)
Yeah, I was just going to chime in and clarify because I don't think we've spelled out what IEQ is for the audience yet. But those three variables that Sean just mentioned kind of relate to each of the three people that you have on the show today. we were each kind of in charge of a separate variable as a part of the study, but each of those things has been, you know, through other research, kind of individually tied. And to your point, Kevin, we know that there's benefits, but this study set out to kind of prove and highlight that benefit and also look how they rank kind of in comparison to each other. So indoor environmental quality is IEQ stands for IEQ for short. So when we say that, that's what we're referring to. That's the part of the study that I spend the most time in and the most attention in as a sustainability specialist. Indoor environmental quality is a big part of our approach to sustainable design and we see sustainability as everything that really falls under kind of that spectrum. Educational adequacy is the variable that Sean is really leading and most passionate about looking at how the learning environment and the kind of adequacy and appropriateness of that environment is influencing the ability to teach and learn within those spaces. And then the final variable being community connectivity is the one that Bruce is leading as he was referencing with his kind of background and community schools model looking at how you know, how the connection with the community kind of going both ways is beneficial to ultimately the kind of outcomes, the educational outcomes that we're striving for here. So think that kind of sets the stage for those three variables.

Kevin Stoller (24:34.324)
helps a lot. Yeah, to look at that. So keeping this on kind of on your interest on Heather of like the, what were the measurements and kind of the before and the afters and you know, like the lessons learned that you think are worth sharing when you are looking at that at the environmental.

Heather Jauregui (24:50.278)
Sure. Yeah, so breaking it down even further in indoor environmental quality, we like to look at four main measures. So we study thermal comfort. That's looking at air temperature, humidity, but also other variables like airspeed and mean radiant temperature can impact whether or not you're comfortable in an environment. We look at air quality. There's a lot of different indicators for air quality, but primarily we look at CO2 levels and particulate matter, so PM2.5. And then the third variable we look at is acoustics, both background noise levels. So is there a lot of outside noise or a lot of mechanical noise within a classroom environment, as well as looking at occupied noise level. So how loud does the class get during the course of the day and does that escalate? And the final variable is light, primarily looking at access to daylight and how that daylight can distribute within a space in the presence of glare.

So those are kind of the four overarching variables as a part of this study where we were comparing non-modernized schools, so schools that hadn't had any significant investment in the previous 10 to 20 years, versus modernized schools, which had a significant investment. They could be either a new construction or a major renovation, but they were considered modernized to a 21st century learning standard.

In that comparative process, we learned a lot about what modernization of school environments currently is having a big influence over. we did see, just as an example, I love to highlight thermal comfort. We do these studies in the middle of winter when the delta between indoor and outdoor environments is greatest. And that's when we see the biggest discrepancy in a building system not being able to keep pace with the outdoor conditions.

What was surprising to me here was not only were modernized schools as expected more commonly in the comfort zone, which is what we're designing that to, but then non-modernized schools, when they were in the comfort zone, you would expect them to be too cold, but they were actually way too hot. So not only were the non-modernized classrooms not comfortable and students and teachers were complaining, were creating uncomfortable environments there, but...

Heather Jauregui (27:16.054)
were more than often not too hot, which means they were uncomfortable and we were wasting energy in the process. Which is just kind of, unfortunately, we found that across the board. So that's, that's, you know, one of the takeaways that, you know, we found here is that, particularly in the thermal comfort category, think we also saw in air quality, it was interesting, we actually did not see a difference in CO2 levels between non-modernized versus modernized spaces. And this was a little surprising because CO2 is something that has been tied to improve cognitive function. is something that obviously within a learning environment is something that can and should be emphasized. But we didn't see a kind of significant difference between modernized and non-modernized from that perspective. We did see a significant reduction in particulate matter though in modernized environments those environments are doing better at kind of filtering their air and maintaining kind of clean ability of those spaces to reduce the amount of particulates that's in the indoor environments and consequently influencing student and teacher health and wellbeing.

Kevin Stoller (28:28.808)
That's fascinating to hear those things too. Yeah, I mean, those are things that maybe the existing buildings can try to take that and be like, all right, can we control temperature a little bit more? Because that is fascinating to hear that it's, yeah, typically you think it's the other way around. Bruce, from your perspective on the community, like what were the things that you wanted to learn? What were the things that you wanted to test and find out?

Bruce Levine (28:54.092)
Yeah, I mean, I think we went into it, Kevin, with the idea that schools are potentially major anchors of a community. And sometimes they do that job better than others. But we really wanted to figure out as best we could. And this was really kind of pushing the envelope a bit when the AIA awarded us a Latrobe Prize. I think they were intrigued by the fact that we were kind of adding this to what Perkins Eastman had previously been able to measure to one extent or another in their schools. This was kind of taking it another step. And community connectivity is a bit of a fluid term, right? As Heather indicated, we look at it as kind of a two-way process. How does bringing the community into the school better enable the school to fulfill its mission? But also, how does the school and its building serve a role in providing either services or other kinds of supports to the community? And so unfortunately due to COVID, in some ways this ended up being the least robust set of data that we came up with because we were really basing it on interviews and focus groups with parents and outside community members. And it was a little hard to access them under the circumstances.

What we did learn is that the modernized schools absolutely had an impact on how people looked at the school and its operation. So they viewed it more as a kind of hub and asset to the community than the non-modernized school respondents did. That's not to say the non-modernized schools were viewed as disasters in any way. People actually felt perhaps surprisingly good about buildings that by any measure we would look at and say were far outdated, somewhat dilapidated, and yet people had positive feelings about it, wishing that more investment would go into it to modernize it, but still feeling relatively good. you know, I think what we came away with, besides desire to do more research and gather more data on this point, was that there's clearly an impact on the community when you have a modernized school building and it has all kinds of salient salientary impacts both in terms of bringing people in and the school having sort of waves of influence on the surrounding community. The other thing that we looked at even though this wasn't so much really technically community connectivity is we actually looked at archival data about both the schools in both cities. And what we found through just looking at essentially publicly available data was that there were statistically significant improvements in enrollment in modernized schools, which is a big deal, especially at a time when we see public schools having shrinking enrollments. If modernization can have an impact on that, that's great. We also saw some impacts, statistically significant ones, on standardized test scores, both English and math. We also saw increasing trends in graduation rates, although that was not statistically significant. in something that was a bit anomalous and sort of a surprise and something that I think merits further looking into, we actually saw truancy actually increased in the modernized schools, which sort of cut against the enrollment information. That's something that bears further looking into, but clearly the archival data kind of further backed some of the other salutary impacts we see from the modernization.

Kevin Stoller (32:54.536)
Yeah, Sean, any surprises for you?

Sean O'Donnell (32:59.314)
Yeah, there were a couple actually. So educational adequacy was framed around several sorts of inputs. One is a survey of students and teachers that we had the opportunity to take advantage of. But then there was a tool called the visual assessment tool or VAT that we created to actually walk through each of the 28 buildings. This was across two districts that we were surveying so that we could, you know, again assess on a number of different factors. You know, the quality of the learning environment and the factors we were looking at was presence, safety and security, community, both within and around the campus. But Bruce was mostly focused on the around the campus. The organization the quality of the instructional space, environmental quality, which is Heather's domain, the quality of assembly space, and then the quality of extended learning spaces. And with the help of a statistician who was a very important member of our team, and Bruce was referencing them here, we went through both the student responses and the findings of the VAT to find those statistically significant areas where modernized schools differed from non-modernized schools. And while I might have gone into the study thinking that we'd have some insights on extended learning spaces and some of the more contemporary ideas that are built into the educational specifications that both districts were using, where we really found the difference to be is in many ways in the sort of perceptual quality of the environment and the experience that the students were having of that environment. so within the classroom measures, for example, we had two categories that we deemed aspects of learning ambiance. So

Sean O'Donnell (35:23.084)
One of the aspects or one of the categories within Ambiance was color and finishes. The other was infrastructure. And both of those were the most statistically significant differences between the modernized buildings and the non-modernized buildings. And there was, I think, to me, shocking, you know, in some ways that that was the most powerful statistically important aspect that came out of the visual assessment that also was reinforced by the students' response that the modernized schools, the quality of the instructional space was more inviting, more welcoming, more warm, certainly than the non-modernized schools. But it's... I think came to bear, you even as we were doing the studies that we, you know, you stood in some of the non modernized buildings and you realized that the environments were something that, you know, in many ways was off putting, right? You know, I'm, trying to be politically correct in some ways in saying this. I knew it was shocking how bad some of these, these facilities were. And you ask yourself, how could we send children into some of these environments, right? And this is what was coming out through both analyses so that the modernized buildings had color, they had, of course, daylight, they had more comfortable furniture, many of the things that we would assume. But if you looked at the counterpoints in the non-modernized schools, there's water damage, there's a lack of color, there were interventions made over time that perhaps on the infrastructure side were thought of as a positive. So putting air conditioning, for example, into a classroom. But there were many examples where, you know, it was the conventional window shaker that was put into a window, therefore blocking up a window and conduit was run all over the classroom to provide power to that location. So here you have a well-intentioned intervention for thermal comfort, but it diminished the natural light. It created sort of a chaotic visual environment in the classroom here. So I think the most powerful takeaway in many ways is that we respect the power or the message that we send to our children maybe, by putting them into these environments and that they resonate very strongly with us. So an environment that's visually chaotic, they respond to, right? An environment that is coherent and pleasant and warm and inviting, they respond very powerfully to that, right?

And so that was one of the strongest takeaways from the educational adequacy piece. And I think it's often a quality of the environment that sometimes can be downplayed, right? And, you know, in our conversations that, you know, does color really matter? Yes, it does. You know, does. Do the finishes that we put in our environment matter? Yes, they do.

And again, are there ways that we can think about this that suggests that even the smallest interventions that we make in our environments can be positive or negative opportunities too, right? So you can paint a learning environment that's perhaps not fully modernized and put some new furniture in it and possibly have an outsized impact, right?

But conversely, if you do make an intervention, like putting an air conditioner in the window, you can have an outsized negative impact, you know, and one that you didn't expect. Right. So so that that I think was the most surprising piece for me to come out of that.

Kevin Stoller (39:51.486)
Yeah.

Kevin Stoller (39:55.548)
Yeah, that is that's a great example. And now as you were going there was going through some of the slides you provided, which I'll put in the link for the listeners so that they could reference back to this. But it sounds to me like there is one big overwhelming thing. And I don't want to answer this for you, but I think I know what the answer is. But if there was some like something that we could do, like the most important thing that we could do right now.

And I don't want to go too big, let's just say as a country or as like a state or something of saying, hey, we need to deal with our educational facilities. Well, what would you advocate for at this point?

Sean O'Donnell (40:39.222)
We actually have, you know, the, again, working with a statistician, we prioritized, you know, or found a ranking within the study here that worked through many of these issues. You know, so, you know, from the educational adequacy standpoint, again, it was, you know, creating an environment that really respects and honors the people that are using the building. So we also found similar findings on even the presence of the building and what we call civic presence in the environment that if the building looks like it's cared for, if it looks like it represents that something important is in the building, that it's clean, you you can find the front door. These things matter to people, right? You even if they never step in the building, they're, they're assessing, you know, how the building represents, how you personally are being valued, right? The students responded very strongly to that too. so you would then go down through this idea of, know, how do we create a really inviting learning ambiance? And with that, you then begin to engage many of the things that Heather found, right? So again, I think we sent you the scale, but if we didn't, we'll send it to you. But Heather, I'm sure you'd want to embellish this.

Heather Jauregui (42:10.938)
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a lot that came out of the study, so it's kind of hard sometimes to summarize it into a sound bite. But I think there's a few things that I would take away from the study. One is this whole study is intended to help school districts advocate for more funding to showcase the value and the benefit to students, teachers, educational outcomes to Sean's earlier story, like that's the point of this study. So we want districts to utilize this to leverage, to get the access to funding that they need to bring their schools up to speed. But knowing that funding and resources are limited, I think the other benefit of this study is making sure that we're thinking holistically with the limited investments that we have.

I was talking to a school district the other day where they were saying, our interventions are based on conditions or problems. We go into a school when there's an issue and that's when we modernize. That's when we update. So to Sean's point, if there's an issue with thermal comfort, we come in, we address the issue. But putting on kind of blinders and addressing that issue in isolation can be detrimental to these other variables, which we've shown can have a significant impact on learning outcomes. making sure that like utilizing the study when you do go into those conditions to instead look at while I'm here, is there opportunity for me to also with limited additional investment enhance the ambiance of this environment, right? Look at, know, can I can, is there something I can do to improve the ambiance, the presence, the know, instructional space, the organization of this, the programmatic, you know, there's a lot of variables that were in the educational adequacy that were shown to be significant. And how can I do that while I'm coming in to do this maybe mechanical upgrade to make sure that I'm delivering a better quality, you know, thermal comfort environment for students.

Kevin Stoller (44:26.676)
I will let you answer that one too before I interject.

Bruce Levine (44:32.11)
I appreciate that. I think Heather and Sean said a lot of what I would have said, but I think the other piece of it is that we, thinking of it in terms of the investment issue that Heather just outlined, communities need to look at their schools as more than just a place where we send our kids into some room to learn for six, seven hours a day, right? It's a community asset and it should be looked at that way and built to meet a variety of needs that go beyond just some of the important things that go into making classrooms as viable and as conducive to learning as possible, but also that whether it's the outside grounds that serve as a recreational outlet for the community or a gathering place for the community inside, by the same token, when we bring partners into the school to work with our students and teachers, you know, let's have a real space for them that's designed with them in mind. So it's really about taking a thoughtful approach to addressing an infrastructure problem that we all know we have. You know, we sort of put a number around it in terms of, you know, $80 billion, but it's probably more than that. And with every day of inflation, certainly more than that. We've got to take care of that. Let's do it in a thoughtful way. that takes advantage of what we've learned through research and experience and treat schools as something, again, other than a very limited functioning institution.

Kevin Stoller (46:12.584)
Well, thank you for sharing this. again, these slides are really helpful too to talk about that $85 billion shortfall that we have annually and to be able to visually show the results of the study. think the next thing, and that's what I, you know, like for me, the passion of why we do this podcast and why we're trying to connect these communities is, is that anyone who's working in the education industry, this is so painfully obvious to us, right? Like, there's not anyone who an architect or anyone who is working on schools that does not see this issue in front of us every single day. It's now about how do we take all this data? How do we take these stories and make a really compelling case to really the people that do make those decisions, whether it's looking at the political side, which I typically don't want to go anywhere near that discussion.

What I'm more interested in is how do we pull in the communities? So can say your point, Bruce, is like, why can we get to the point where the local communities are demanding this? And I think being able to tell these stories, to take this data, put it into some really, really compelling, more like entertainment types of things, where meet people where they're at, is to me like the next step that we need to take on kind of as an industry is like we.

We know this. There is a point where we're like, we know this. We know there's a better way to do it. We're not saying we have all the answers 100%, but we at least know the better direction to go. And now it's about like, all right, it's time for action. We gotta start doing this. And that's what gets me excited because I feel like we've seen this buildup that's been going on in our industry.

And what schools are looking like now when we do have the opportunities to modernize it. So now how do we just continue to leverage that because, you know, there's a lot of schools out there that desperately need it.

Sean O'Donnell (48:19.758)
Yeah, we certainly appreciate your helping us get the word out, Kevin. So thank you for inviting us to the conversation here. But let me give you one or two anecdotes. And I'm not sure that we're quite at the, you know, the sophistication that you're looking at. But the chief operating officer of DCPS

Kevin Stoller (48:26.608)
Yeah

Sean O'Donnell (48:43.482)
You know, the former chief operating officer, when we did the nine building study, that was a precedent to the Latrobe. he took that and he appended it to his next two cycles of budget requests that went up to the city council. You know, so in many ways, we already started answering that city councilor's challenge, you know, from many years ago was, okay, you asked, you know, does you know, is there proof that there's a connection between the quality of the learning environment and educational outcomes? And yes, there is. so, you know, what we're hoping is to, give more school board members, you know, the, the, the data and the research to say, you know, look, we're having an impact here. This investment is, is important. it's paying back, right. And, and it's paying back dividends. So, that's again, in many ways the audience that we were targeting, but the more that the community embraces this too, so that they're asking their school board representatives, why aren't we investing in these facilities? And we often venture into jurisdictions where getting a bond referendum passed is hard.

Right? So, you again, what we're trying to do is give people the evidence that, you know, that investment is worthwhile and it's really an investment in the future of their communities. Right? And that's, you know, the tools that we hope, you know, the Latrobe study and then all our subsequent work is going to provide to communities.

Kevin Stoller (50:29.492)
Yeah, well, this is great. I really appreciate you, the three of you joining, the work you're doing, being willing to share it. It is needed. Everyone's playing a part in really this movement that, you know, like we got a lot of work to do. it is only helping our case for somebody to listen to this and grab it and be like, all right, where else can we use this so that we can make an impact? 

So Sean, Heather, Bruce, thank you so much for your time. Really appreciate it.

Heather Jauregui (51:03.718)
Thanks for having us.

Sean O'Donnell (51:04.634)
Thank you.

Kevin Stoller (51:05.364)
Yeah, and to the listeners, if you have not already subscribed, betterlearningpodcast.com is our hub for everything. We'll have the show notes to all of these and as well as we have other resources on there. If you want to be a guest, if you have a topic or an idea that you want us to explore more, that's where we get a lot of our things that we go through our planning meeting to decide who we who we have on the show. So.

Hope this one is helpful and we'll have all of our information on there too if anyone does have any follow-up in there. So thank you. Appreciate it.