Description

Feather River Academy is a public high school operated by the Sutter County Superintendent of Schools Office for at risk youths from grades 7 to 12. Current enrolment comprises approximately 100 full-time students and 75 independent students who attend part-time for specific study sessions. Students referred to the FRA have either been expelled from district schools, sent by the courts due to their low level criminal activities, or are assigned by the probation service. All students have severe discipline issues.

As academic performance is almost always related to one or other of these dysfunctional groupings, students with low or deficient credit ratings may also end up here, to re-adjust their performance through intensive tutor sessions. The children served by FRA are the most at risk in the community and many feel they are disenfranchised from society as a whole. Designing the new buildings required a fully therapeutic environment to support a spectrum of mild to severely damaged individuals together with a low key and unobtrusive but effective internal and external security system.

The decision to appoint Architecture for Education was made because of their pioneering work in developing schools inclusively. The design process incorporated action workshops with staff, students, community agencies and other key stakeholders. This approach was critical in developing a learning environment which students and staff would be proud of and to which they would feel a sense of ownership and belonging. One might also speculate on the need to consult as a form of practical research into a building type, which is barely understood.

Following three years of planning and construction, the school finally opened in the fall of 2005. The accommodation is set out in campus style, forming what can be described as a ‘learning village’. On a flat 1.6-hectare site, the complex programme of accommodation intermingles and knits together the various programmatic components right across the site. The architecture itself is characterised by a series of linked single-storey pavilions with dynamic folding roofs; overhangs and canopies capture outside spaces, making the play between inside and outside an essential aspect of the learning experience. The programme comprises classrooms, multi-purpose rooms, administration areas, a building for special educational needs, a greenhouse for educational and therapeutic planting and an Internet café. The external site amenities include learning gardens, formal and informal playing fields, an outdoor stage, covered arcades, parking and multi-purpose activity courts or plazas. Classrooms are paired around a shared resource area and various outside spaces extend the learning environment out into the landscape, which was a critical requirement coming out of the consultation.

Feather River Academy serves an academic community enrolled three to four years below grade level. Understandably perhaps, students suffer from low self-esteem and require constant one on one counseling and periodical supervision from the probation services. Staff and administration personnel strive to meet the needs of each child individually in a more intimate high school setting than is the norm. Their aim is to return students to their home districts as normal, fully functioning, and most importantly, caring members of the community who will subsequently be able to contribute to society. For this the external environment has an important role to play; for example, the open areas between the buildings have linear dry stream beds that come to life during the winter months, a garden planting programme fosters students’ understanding of the agricultural qualities of the community, which is facilitated by the careful positioning of the pavilions around the campus; in addition, antique farm equipment from pioneering farms throughout the county is carefully placed around this special landscape for learning.

It is important to recognise the intensive period of development work with the end users and other stakeholders, which contributed to the success of the final design. These were not just issues relating to practicalities such as room layouts and adjacencies that were discussed in detail; also, more complex aesthetic design aspects were implemented as a result of this consultation, such as the desire for a varied roof line, perhaps an outdoor theme reflecting the local mountains and Pacific Bird Flyway.

Some projects are included in this book because they are stylish architectural statements, which make students feel they are part of a modern technological world. This project is not one of them. It is low key and relaxed in style, a perfect match for the semi-rural setting. However, the school is a complex and well-worked design, which complements its sensitive functioning to provide a truly therapeutic environment for the 21st century.

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Originally published in: Mark Dudek, Schools and Kindergartens: A Design Manual, Birkhäuser, 2015.