The integration of school and community in providing the education program means that many aspects of the program should not be built into the school buildings...
The Centers should be linked to the larger community, other Centers, and to the middle and elementary schools through rapid transit and highways and through telephone, radio, television, and a computer communication system. independent study should be grouped nearby.
Units might be most conveniently and economically arranged in groups of two and be accompanied by those larger or more specialized facilities which they can together fully utilize. Perhaps each unit should occupy a floor of a building with their joint facilities located in a floor between. A further refinement might be placing the five curriculum areas in the same area on each floor so that students and staff working in particular curriculum areas could have easy access to their counterparts in the other unit and to the more specialized joint resources located on the floor between the two units by simply moving vertically.
The several units which comprise a Center would share certain central resources like the main library, the theater-concert hall, and the spectator sports center, resources which must be accessible to every student or which will draw some students from each unit. Ideally, many of of these facilities would also be used by citizens who are not enrolled in the schools, thus further integrating schools and community.
The integration of school and community in providing the education program means that many aspects of the program should not be built into the school buildings, as the previous section on the recommended program for secondary education has pointed out.
On the other hand, this integration will place new requirements on school construction. The Education Centers will have to provide space and facilities for non-school personnel who come into the school from business, government, or university to participate in the in-school program or to work in the ancillary educational facilities, such as research and development. The Education Centers should be schools for adults as well as children, and they may be used for adult education at various times of day and night. Such use would require space adaptable to adult programs, and it might require some space reserved for adult day-time programs. Of course, the Centers should be planned for week-long and year-round use. This "after-school" use could include a wide variety of programs outside the regular curriculum, such as the Junior Academy of Science, which would bring together public and non-public school children with members of the scientific community in Pittsburgh.
The Centers should be linked to the larger community, other Centers, and to the middle and elementary schools through rapid transit and highways and through telephone, radio, television, and a computer communication system. For example, two-way television will be needed to facilitate such linkage and to multiply the experiences and the range of competence that can be brought into classrooms. Here, too community resources, such as WQED -- the educational television station -- should be utilized. In addition, the possibility of including Instructional Television Fixed Service on frequency bands especially reserved by the Federal Communications Commission should be explored. In order to provide two-way television, classrooms should be equipped for transmission as well as reception. With two-way television, any given classroom is part of the educational television network of the other classrooms and therefore children at one end of a hook-up are able to participate actively in a lesson originating at the other end. Where it is possible, the non-public schools should be included in the system.
Finally, although education requires some highly specialized "hardware," it does not, in general, require a highly specialized structure. Thus, it is possible to construct school facilities capable of accommodating rapidly changing educational requirements. By using such construction, the Education Center can adapt to changes in education and also be adapoted to non-school functions.
Using conventional concepts of school construction, sites of between thirty and forty acres will be needed for the Education Centers and fifteen to twenty for the middle schools. And the sites should have a substantial amount of level space for outside physical education activity. The acquisition of sites of these sizes and of this character will be very difficult. In densely populated urban areas -- particularly where topography limits available land as it does in Pittsburgh, it is possible to utilize new construction techniques to provide needed facilities on a minimum of land. Building vertically rather than horizontally, placing athletic fields on roofs, allocating several floors of a high rise structure to athletics, even creating an "all weather" sports center with movable walls which could be retracted to let in fresh air and sun in good weather, all are possible. Such construction techniques could reduce by as much as 50 per cent the land needed for school purposes. Nevertheless, every effort should be exerted to obtain the largest possible sitse for the combined use of school construction and other urban facilities. These sites should be developed so as to accommodate school and non-school activities, and flexible arrangements which would intersperse school and other uses should be adopted.
Sites for new educational facilities could be more readily obtained if land acquisition efforts of the Board of Education are coordinated with the efforts of urban renewal and other city agencies. The urban centers and the educational facilities within them should be designed as drawing points for all of the citizens of the five large large districts indicated in the following section of this report. The sites should therefore be selected to create common meeting grounds for the older, traditional neighborhoods. Innovative designing can make available sites in Pittsburgh which will fit these criteria. Parts of the centers can be built as air right structures over highways or rivers or as bridges across canyons. And such building can and should be done without marring the natural beauty of Pittsburgh's rivers, hills, and valleys. Structures which span valleys can also bring together neighborhoods long isolated by topography. Steep hills need not be barriers either to construction or to access routes. Hills and valleys can become architectural assets in planning exciting urban centers for Pittsburgh