Completion Date:     1/4/2016

Square Footage:      53258

Building Use:           Designed to replace an aging neighborhood elementary school

Location:                 Oxnard, CA

Project Description:

Picture the opportunity to create a new elementary school as a cultural center for an under-served community, supporting the neighborhood; creating an educational experience with a new high-tech foundation; designing the school on an existing active campus, and allowing students to transfer to a reinvented school of the future. This existing 1950’s campus has provided a palette for renewal, building on an existing playfield to provide continuous campus operation during construction, and then converting phased portions of the former campus into an adjacent early childhood development center to complete a broad range of neighborhood pre-school and K-6 facilities all on one site. The design solution focuses upon a number of priorities:

• The campus center is an open plaza; the hub of academic and community life. Opening like a window to the adjacent residential street, the courtyard creates an important bond between the neighborhood and academia.
• The Multi-Purpose Building serves as the primary focus for campus life, facing the public entry in support of that educational and community connection.
• The Information Technology Center opens inward to the campus and outward to the neighborhood; enhancing community activities at all hours as a joint use facility without opening the entire campus in the evening.
• Technology is the student lifeline, rich in curriculum delivery strategies. Everyone links to the campus backbone anywhere, any time. Every location provides wireless connectivity, and computers and tablets are provided to every child.
• Students gather in hi-tech high-touch flex classrooms to ideate and research in a project-based learning environment; rich with natural light, enhanced with sliding whiteboards, providing multiple flat screens and teacher podiums, and offering a variety of flexible furniture configurations.
• Discussion and ideas flow and result in student-produced multimedia presentations that are uploaded and accessed campus-wide, setting a new standard for the delivery of a District-wide 21st Century curriculum strategy.
• A phased development plan has delivered this new elementary school while existing campus buildings are converted into a Child Development Center as Phase II, to support children and families from pre-school through grade six on one site.
• High-performance and sustainability goals have been met through self-certified CHPS and non-certified LEED for Schools standards to exceed California Title 24.
• Concepts explored the Academy of Neuroscience for Architecture have been applied here, enhancing wellness, learning and cognition through such strategies as the manipulation of light, acoustics, color, focal length, connectivity and wayfinding.

Norma Harrington Elementary School is the catalyst transforming this neighborhood and this District, creating a lifelong platform that will propel each of these students to excellence. A win for each child is a win for this entire community and for their collective future. Tangible transformations are already apparent; with a renewed community commitment to excellence, increased technological skill sets forming, and accelerated student academic focus and performance metrics on the rise.

C.O.T.E. | Committee on the Environment

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