Long Beach Unified parents, students, and community members gathered at Browning High School to provide suggestions for the district’s Facilities Master Plan at a community forum yesterday.
Through interactive and collaborative activities, around 40 attendees shared their thoughts as a group on what school buildings need to look like and provide to ensure an equitable and adequate education for all student populations. Some common suggestions included more green spaces, transitioning off of fossil fuels, and access to healthier cafeteria food.
As per LBUSD’s website, the Facilities Master Plan is a “long-term blueprint” that outlines the constantly changing needs of facilities in the district. The plan looks both at how facilities are designed and how they are used and intends to properly align facilities with the district’s overall educational mission.
The update process typically takes over two years, incorporating a needs assessment for every school, community input, and equity analysis. The district is working with the architectural firm Cannon Design to run assessments, gather community feedback and draft the plan that will be submitted to the school board this summer.
Paul Mills, senior vice president of K-12 Strategy at Cannon Design, facilitated yesterday’s forum and said that he and his team want to design facilities “intentionally in a way that accommodates everyone’s needs.”
In one of the activities, attendees were given stickers to add to a poster on the wall containing different educational areas to emphasize in the Facility Master plan such as athletics, S.T.E.M and language arts.
The stickers served as votes for attendees to stick on the areas they felt needed to be prioritized. “Solar Energy and Sustainability” as well as “Health and Wellness” were the areas with the most stickers. One parent pointed out the correlation between both areas as creating green spaces inevitably helps with emotional wellness and health.
Attendees were also asked to visualize how the district would look and what actions needed to be taken if it aspired to be the most healthy, innovative, and equitable school district in California.
Diana Michaelson, founder and president of the Long Beach Green Schools Campaign (LBGSC), said that one of the best ways for LBUSD to be more healthy is to not contribute to the problem of climate change.
“As of right now, everything we’re doing is [releasing] CO2 emissions into the atmosphere,” Michaelson said. “We are a part of the problem.”
Michaelson also echoed another attendee’s sentiment that LBUSD does not need to “reinvent the wheel” and that other school districts have done and passed some of the resolutions parents and students at LBUSD are advocating for.
As for innovation, parents suggested incorporating career development opportunities and courses earlier on in students’ academic journey as well as having a sort of team where students interested in innovation can work on finding solutions to real-world problems.
Furthermore, most attendees agreed that in order for LBUSD to be more equitable, ensuring all schools offer the same programs and resources is crucial.
LBGSC member and Long Beach Poly freshman Ruthie Heiss said that a product of inequity at schools is the commute students living in more polluted areas like West Long Beach often have to make to attend school in a different area.
LBUSD has an open-enrollment policy which means that despite students having an assigned school based on their home address, parents are free to enroll their children in any LBUSD school they choose.
This allows students who have an interest in any specific programs or resources at a particular school to enroll there instead of their designated school. However, this choice often comes with trade-offs such as a longer commute, increased traffic, a divided neighborhood, and more fossil fuel emissions.
Los Cerritos Elementary school Parent-Teacher Association president Kirsten Snyder said that it is important to maintain school enrollment choice despite the tradeoffs.
“Not giving people choice risks losing them out of the district,” Snyder said.
Michaelson shared how some of her peers strayed from their assigned high school for social reasons and to be part of certain magnet programs.
“These schools are different and have different needs which is why the focus should be on balancing them out,” she said.
Community members are encouraged to provide suggestions for the Facility Master Plan here.
Mills said initial recommendations will be written and presented to LBUSD over the summer. It will be “categorical in nature” and recommendations will include the input from forum attendees as well as survey responses.
“The courageous words that have been lifted up by our students, community members, parents and educators are really appreciated,” Mills said.
