Successful Schools, Successful Businesses

How One of the Nation’s Largest Counties Is Planning for Both

Covering 2,207 square miles, Baldwin County, Alabama, is one of the largest counties in the country—and growing, at least in terms of its economy. New business increased more than 170 percent over the last six years, particularly in automotive, aviation, healthcare and construction, helping earn the county a place on Forbes magazine’s list of Top 50 Places to Start and Grow a Business.

With so many businesses moving in, Baldwin County’s schools have also experienced explosive growth, as well as increased pressure to produce a more skilled workforce for the future. The Baldwin County school system decided to take an aggressive approach. With help from SHP Leading Design (SHP), they created a strategic plan for the future direction of career and technical education (CTE) programs.

“Within the school system, there is a need to balance curriculum, communication, technology, staffing, resources, facilities and student services for more than 26,000 students and almost 4,000 employees,” says Mike Dingeldein, vice president – architecture for SHP. “The school system also faces challenges due to its sheer geographical size.”

Baldwin County spans approximately 90 miles north and south and 45 miles east to west, and includes seven existing middle schools, high schools and CTE schools. That posed logistical challenges as SHP had to develop consensus across rural, suburban and urban communities home to a diverse group of students, parents, teachers, staff, administrators, business partners and community members.

A New Approach to CTE

One thing that these stakeholders agreed upon from the beginning, however, was the desire to offer students a wider range of opportunities and experiences that would truly prepare them for a career. The school system wants to stay on top of the nationwide trend of integrating career/technical studies throughout classes—for example, writing a paper for English that is in the style of a business study, or incorporating business budgeting scenarios into math problems.

“Baldwin County was really looking for a strategy that would re-cook the whole approach to career/technical schools, to see how a new career/technology school could be designed to benefit the entire county,” says Steve Schwandner, president of Seeideas, Inc. Schwandner worked with SHP to conduct the research inherent in SHP’s Schoolhouse of Quality process.

The beauty of this incorporating community input is that the resulting designs turn career technical schools into modern-day training facilities, thereby expanding the very definition of schoolhouse.

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Research consisted of seven individual two-hour focus groups, one for each middle school, high school and technical school combination. Each group was made up of eight to 10 instructors, staff, students and parents, for a total of about 60 people. Additionally, two-hour focus groups were held for representatives of businesses located within each of four community zones.

The research identified 43 values important to Baldwin County. Among the most important were the desires to “present opportunities for all students to receive some form of career preparation education” and to “provide the most up-to-date, real-world technology and equipment for every aspect of the teaching/learning process.”

“That’s the qualitative,” says Schwandner. “Then we got the quantitative.” That came via 400 written and telephone surveys for additional perspective on current and future educational offerings.

“Because this is about a career/technical school, we also asked 579 teachers and students to rate their excitement about and interest in supporting and participating in 16 different career academic clusters,” Schwandner says.

Applying the “Four Ps”

Next, a 15-person design team, made up of people who had participated in the research, sat down with SHP to craft a strategy reflecting identified values. What the design team discovered was that all 43 values could be divided into one of four groups:

• People-related issues (such as the need to have enough teachers to staff academically rich schools)
• Program-related issues (which classes would be taught and how)
• Place-related issues (where the school or schools would be located in the county)
• Promotion-related issues (how to promote the new school to students, businesses and the community)

Those “four Ps” were then tested to evaluate how each delivered on the community’s needs, including whether or not the CTE schools should make the transition from a traditional career academy to an all-inclusive, integrated high school/CTE offering.

SHP’s ultimate recommendation was for the Baldwin County school system to build new career academy magnet schools—at least two to start, and ideally more as the schools grow—taking into account issues such as budget, timing and where the schools could be located in such a large county. As Schwandner says, “It just can’t be done if people have to drive 50 miles to get to school.

“The schools would both be planned for the future, and would ultimately hold 1,800 kids,” Schwandner continues. “These would be expandable buildings—one would start out with a 1,200-student capacity, and the other would start out with 900. Other schools would feed into them.”

Large County, Small World

The reception from Baldwin County was positive. SHP is currently preparing more detailed concepts including visualizations of how the completed schools might look. Like the county itself, Schwandner is excited about what the future might bring.

“The world is a lot smaller today, and we’re starting to feel it,” he says. “In the meetings with us, these businesses were talking about the fact that we need to have kids prepared better faster. That’s the whole point of these schools. It shouldn’t take a young guy until he’s 29 years old to figure out how he’s going to make a difference in this world. We definitely need to help kids and their parents figure things out a little bit earlier.”

“The beauty of this input is that the resulting designs turn career technical schools into modern-day training facilities,” Dingeldein says. “They expand the very definition of schoolhouse. The schools increase the number of customers they can serve. And just as more customers are better for businesses, more customers mean more support for career technical education.”

And the process of figuring out what’s best for Baldwin County adds value to the community, Dingeldein says. “Schools thrive with community support,” he says. “Incorporating ideas from the community makes the decisions more clear and produces more innovative designs.”