Schools turn nontraditional spaces into places of opportunity
A chunk of unused space in a busy suburban shopping mall seems an unlikely location for a school. So does a storefront in a nondescript strip center off the Southwest Freeway, or a vacant grocery store building. Yet unused commercial spaces like these increasingly are being adapted as venues for learning.
Next month, the Katy Independent School District will open an academy for dropouts in Katy Mills Mall. It will provide an opportunity for students who left without graduating — about 275 a year in Katy ISD — to finish their studies and get a diploma, as the Houston Chronicle’s Sebastian Herrera reported last week.
In 2005, the Houston Independent School District opened Liberty High School to serve immigrants, many of them older than typical high school students, who may have had limited education in their home countries. A basketball goal droops over the parking lot in front of Liberty High, wedged into the corner of a strip center that also includes a tax preparation office and a kidney dialysis center.
In north Houston, students at YES Prep’s White Oak campus attend class in a space that used to be a Kroger store. The charter chain has established schools in office buildings, retail centers, a church and a delivery warehouse, said Keith Weaver, managing director for operations. Because every building is different, “we’ve got to be a little bit more flexible” with the design, Weaver said.
The use of non-traditional spaces for schools is particularly beneficial for charters, which don’t get money from the state for facilities.
Changes in the way Americans shop are creating more opportunities for what preservationists call “adaptive reuse.” Last week, the Macy’s department store chain announced plans to close 100 stores nationwide, the latest example of the struggles of brick-and-mortar retailers to compete with online shopping options. The closures create vast vacant spaces that can turn into blight unless someone finds a good use for them: Consider the bleak, shuttered storefronts lining FM 1960 in northwest Harris County.
“I think a lot of commercial real estate owners are trying to be creative to look for uses of space,” said Jay Kenworthy, a spokesman for the Simon Youth Foundation, which is partnering with Katy ISD on the new academy for dropouts.
Simon Property Group owns Katy Mills Mall and many other well-known retail centers, including Houston’s Galleria. The foundation is an affiliated nonprofit that works with school districts to create dropout academies at Simon-owned properties.
Unlike many dying malls across the country, Katy Mills Mall is flourishing as the suburb west of Houston continues its rapid growth. But even in a property without an abundance of vacant space, the foundation can make use of out-of-the-way corners that are not tempting to retailers, Kenworthy said.
Some take issue
The Katy school will be the foundation’s 27th dropout academy and its third in Texas. The foundation pays for renovation of the space, which usually costs more than $500,000, while the school districts provide the curriculum and instruction. Katy ISD will spend about $655,000 a year on the program.
The use of vacant commercial spaces for schools has drawn some criticism. Susan Linn, the co-founder and director of the Campaign for a CommercialFree Childhood in Boston, told the Harvard Education Letter that learning inside a mall sends the wrong messages to impressionable teens.
“The mere fact they are located in that environment means they are assaulted with advertising and highly sophisticated marketing messages every day,” Linn said. “The purpose of marketing is to subvert reason to sell products. The purpose of school is to promote reason.”
Advantages greater
As a Simon Foundation official pointed out, though, traditional schools also display commercial messages, such as soft-drink signs on scoreboards. Weaver, the YES charter school official, said the chain takes steps to separate students from tenants when it uses partially leased building; in one office building, he said, elevators take students straight to the floor where their classes are.
Any distractions such environments might cause seem like a minor problem compared to the advantages of adaptive reuse. If money saved on construction can be invested in instruction, students are the obvious beneficiaries. It turns out that there may be a good reason for teenagers to hang out at the mall.