In certain special situations, middle school buildings will have to be constructed. There is no existing high school or other secondary facility in the entire southwestern section of Pittsburgh. Recently this has been one of the most rapidly growing areas of the city, and because it has a substantial portion of Pittsburgh's open land, such growth is likely to continue. The total enrollments to be served by the attendance district proposed for this area and a section of the Hill are very large. This single large attendance area could be further divided into two districts served by separate middle schools or it could be retained as a single district served by one large middle school appropriately divided into separate units. This report suggests utilizing separate schools and separate districts, referred to here as South A and South B. Because of the possibility of having a single large attendance area, the report does not specify how the district should be divided except that both South A and South B should include a substantially equal division of both the southwestern and Hill sections.

A new middle school is also recommended in one of the Central I middle school districts although Westinghouse High School is located within the district. Westinghouse is not the oldest or most deteriorated high school in Pittsburgh, but it is 44 years old and has many physical defects, as outlined in Appendix C. Moreover, Westinghouse has become identified as a "Negro school," and it is located within a densely Negro residential area. The new middle school will have an enrollment which is approximately half-white and half-Negro. Achieving a successful education program at a racially integrated school in this district will be much more likely if a new structure with a new image is constructed in a section of the district where whites reside, or where both Negroes and whites reside.

It is also recommended that, because of its age and condition, South Hills High School not be used as a middle school. Prospect Junior High School is a newer and better facility, and it should be used to serve the middle school district in which both Prospect and South Hills are located.

Even though most of the existing high school buildings are satisfactory for temporary use by the lower secondary grades, they are still very old on the average, and long-continued use of them is not desirable. Therefore, in preparing these buildings for the use of the younger children, remodeling should be minimized. Investment in various types of instructional aids and other equipment which can later be moved to new schools should be accentuated.

RECOMMENDATION: Five large Education Centers should be constructed to replace existing high school buildings as the centers of the education program for grades 9-12.

RECOMMENDATION: Three new middle schools should be constructed to serve Pittsburgh's middle school enrollments and twelve of the existing secondary buildings should be adapted to the same use.

RECOMMENDATION: Upon completion of the present recommneded building program, but no later than 1975, Pittsburgh should begin to develop plans for the replacement of all twelve of these adapted secondary buildings with up-to-date middle school of sufficient size and appropriate location to carry out the education program and to serve integrated enrollments.

The construction of new spaces for nearly 34,000 pupils carries a mandate to provide buildings which will facilitate the offering of not only what is new and best in education today but also what will be new and best in the year 2000. It means designing and building with the utmost imagination and flexibility. Designers should think about school structures that can be readily changed from one type of instruction to another, structures with space that might be rented out for other than school purposes during low enrollment years, structures which lend themselves to expansion and to increasing integration with the community. To describe the general characteristics of the new construction, this section discusses the proposed Education Centers, but what is said should be applied, where relevant, to the new middle schools as well.

In Pittsburgh, as in other large urban areas, educators and urban planners have begun to focus attention on the need for relating school construction to the city's other facilities and activities. We propose that Pittsburgh's five Education Centers be located in newly designed urban centers which would constitute an important part of the city's renewal. These urban centers would be linked together by rapid transit and super highways and would share many of the unique resources of the city. But each urban center should be able to serve many of the diverse needs of a substantial segment of the urban population, something on the order of 100,000 people. In such a center, citizens should be able to find employment, purchase goods, further their education, rent housing, play games, sit in the sun, attend concerts, and so on.

The backbone of these centers would be the circulation ways--the malls--where people can travel at their own pace, enjoying and participating in the activities of the day. Along and around these public ways would be grouped the various activities of the center: banks, stores, restaurants, offices, schools, housing. Care must be taken not to create monotonous concourses of commerce where people tend to become lost in the endless repetition of store fronts. Nodes of activity must be created. Scale must change from wide busy pedestrian malls to intimate little walkways. Some of these pedestrian ways should be open to the sun, some enclosed; some should have surroundings which are high and spacious, some low and confining.

Part of the space in these urban centers should be devoted to the Education Centers recommended in this report. Educational facilities should be planned and constructed simultaneously with other facilities. Such integrated planning will permit more flexible facilities and also should eliminate any tendency to duplicate or to concentrate all schooling activities in one part of the complex.

Locations

Since the individual student or teacher will not need to go to every part of the Center, all schooling locations need not be tightly grouped. Instead, they should be related to one another and to the community facilities in terms of the uses to which they will be put. For example, whereas the main library of the Center should be easily accessible to everyone, individual science laboratories and regular classrooms need not be.

In order to provide the wide range of subjects required by the education program, each Education Center will be bringing together very large numbers of students. The creation of a subsystem of student groupings will make it possible to preserve the student's identity in these large educational facilities. These groups should be small enough to permit each student to maintain his sense of individuality, yet large enough by themselves or by combination with other groups to expose the student to a wide range of educational experiences. The Education Center buildings should therefore be constructed so that these groups of students are provided with the necessary physical units of space and equipment, and these units should be so arranged that two or more of them can be combined for various educational and social activities.

Much of a student's schooling experience should be within these smaller units. Each unit would contain as few students as educational demands would allow, roughly five hundred to six hundred students, and each would have its own teachers and administrative and guidance personnel. The student population of each unit should have the same distribution of interests, ages, and races. Each unit should be planned around a common area where students and staff can gather for meetings or meet informally. Branch library resources teachers' offices, administrative and guidance facilities, and areas for