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Abstract
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There can't be many people in Ohio who have heard of Henry Linn. But they're certainly becoming familiar with his work.
Ohio is four years into a massive $10.5 billion school-building program, which is expected to leave very few communities untouched. For many school districts, the prospect of millions of dollars in state aid has been enormously appealing; faced with the question of whether to renovate existing schools, or to abandon them and build anew--often out on the edge of town--they're opting for the new.
There's a reason for this, and that's where Linn comes in. A half- century ago, the Columbia University education professor wrote an article for a trade magazine, American School and University, in which he suggested that if the cost of renovating a school was more than half what it cost to build new, school districts should swallow the extra expense and build new. It's unclear how Linn arrived at this disdain for the old, but until recently, his thinking appeared to hold the force of scripture within school facilities circles. "If you track the literature," says Royce Yeater, the Midwest director for the National Trust for Historic Preservation, "it starts to appear in footnotes, then one study refers back to another.... But still, it all comes back to one man's opinion. If you look at the original article, there's no studies, there's no nothin' behind this. It is clearly an old wives' tale."
Perhaps, but it's an old wives' tale with legs. Many states, Ohio included, use what's now known as the "percentage rule" in deciding whether schools should be renovated or replaced. The actual percentages vary from state to state, but the rules all amount to the same thing: a preference for creating new schools over preserving old ones. In Ohio's case, until a few years ago, a school district couldn't get state money for renovation if it cost more than two- thirds of building new. These days, the "two-thirds rule" is just a guideline, but many school districts, with the encouragement of the state, follow it anyway. Officially, the Ohio School Facilities Commission is neutral on the question. Still, it has a clear, if unstated, preference. "There are a lot of advantages in building new," says spokesman Rick Savors. "You can get into situations when you try to renovate where you have no clue what the actual costs will be; just ask anyone who has renovated a kitchen or bathroom." Which is a part of the reason why, of the 1,300 schools the commission has looked at so far, 790 will be abandoned....
Available:
http://www.governing.com/topics/education/Edge-Ucation.html
KW: SR2S
Language: en |