At Creekside Elementary, we had a post-occupancy building with some of the parents. One said, “I love this school. And my son loves this school. The best way that I can bring him in line when he’s acting up is to threaten that I won’t let him go to school in the morning. He loves coming to school.” I turned to the architect and said, “You did it. You made a school that kids want to come to.” I always hoped that our designs would help a teacher feel good about coming to school. If the teacher wanted to be there and the student wanted to be there, then it only was natural that test scores would rise. The legislature did not like what we were doing. They felt like we were building Taj Mahals and that I was building a Taj Mahal to myself. I had to go to the legislature and testify to some of the committees. I also hosted Howard Stevenson, the head of the group over public education, at a tour of one our newer Layton schools. Stevenson was president of the Utah Taxpayer Association. I believe he and some a few other legislators owned, operated and built charter schools, and they were building the typical double-loaded corridor school with sheet rock walls. I believe they were paying about $127 a square foot for those buildings. In the early 2000s, we had built the Layton school for about $30 a square foot less than the charter schools. We discovered good design doesn’t have to cost more. It just means your architect has to think more. We had engineers who really enjoyed working for us because they got to design things — and the things that they came up with were just amazing. Partway through my career, LED lighting started to come out. We started to utilize it. We did ground source heat pumps, and I think Davis School District probably has more net zero energy schools than any organization in the state, if not the nation. That saves the taxpayer millions of dollars. The good news is that we lowered utility bills in the long run by spending a little more upfront on some of these systems. That money was left on the table for salary increases. It benefited everyone. We did a study in the early 2000s to help quiet some of the noise from the legislature. We discovered that our new architectural plans for the elementary were running $5 to $10 a square foot less than the old H plan. Our junior highs were running $10 to $15 a square foot less than the H plans. I attribute that to the architects and the structural engineers through the materials that they used and the way they engineered the buildings. How did you work with architects to learn about the newest school design innovations? I had a very supportive school board and superintendency backing me up. They allowed us to travel to almost every state in the United States. We attended several conferences where we would focus on school design: AIA conferences, the Council of Education, City Planners International and others where they focused solely on school design. Davis School District has nearly a hundred schools and they are getting very old — the majority over 60 years old. Bryan and I had attended a conference in Florida on facility planning. We developed a document that tracks every single school and every element of that school. It took us a couple of years to develop, but that became the Bible for us. When Davis needs to go out for a bond, they use that document to show the need. Whenever we spent money to replace the school or do a major renovation, we referred to the planning document to show why it needed to be replaced. I went back to my office a couple of weeks ago and visited my successor, he had that document up on his screen and he was going through it. Sunset Junior High School
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