The Salt Lake City School District needed a replacement for Rose Park Elementary School that met these criteria: the new school had to be built on the existing site while students attended the old school; it needed to meet current and future educational needs; the school needed to be fully accessible; the building and outdoor improvements had to be designed for public use during non-school hours; and the school needed to be designed with the involvement of the Rose Park community.

Our multi-discipline team held three intense strategy sessions, diagramming potential solutions for the best placement of the new building (as is often the case, the current building occupied the best location, and the new location needed to safely accommodate construction and staging). The building committee immediately adopted the resulting plan because it met all of the objectives.

We directed a series of 13 meetings with community stakeholders to design the Rose Park School as a community center in a park. (Associate Superintendent Rickie McCandless said we were very "efficient and comfortable" doing this "monumental task.") As a result, the entrance to the school is no longer off a narrow street, but on a primary Rose Park street. GSBS designed the school grounds like a plaza, with the building and grounds accessible to all.

To enhance the educational experience, we organized the school into a village concept, clustering groups of "learning houses" to form a sense of community within a community. Using town planning concepts, we organized these learning houses to form a complete village around a town square, grouping similar ages of learners to share common support spaces.

GSBS has pioneered daylighting principles in office buildings, and wanted to bring this technology to Rose Park School. Recent research shows that "students with the most daylighting in their classrooms progressed 20% faster on math tests and 26% on reading tests in one year than those with the least" (Daylighting in Schools, 1999, Heschong Mahone Group, Fair Oaks, CA, p. 2). We were successful in orienting three-quarters of the classrooms to the south, and equipped them with light shelves which control intense sunlight and enhance low sunlight.