Building Reports

Each of the reports includes a description of the building’s total enrollment in relation to its designed enrollment and utilization (efficiency). These categories are consistent with widespread industry values and are helpful in understanding our building usage across the district’s entire portfolio of schools. Below is a brief description of what that looked like during building walkthroughs: 

1. Underutilized: The school can easily accommodate many additional students into the building.  Finding the right space for a particular class or learning activity is easy in an underutilized building, but the lack of a critical mass of people in the space can make it feel less vibrant compared with more efficiently used buildings.
2. Efficient: The school has about the right number of students for the space.  Scheduling classrooms is relatively easy and there is some unscheduled space to support ad hoc needs or short term uses (like short term partnerships).
3. Highly Efficient: The school is almost perfectly aligned with the number of students in the space. Scheduling classrooms starts to be very tricky, and the incidence of teachers needing to teach in a different space each hour increases.  The building feels very active and vibrant, but there starts to be an elevated level of concern that the space may start to interfere with the intended functioning of the school. District-level conversations should be occurring about the trend lines of these programs to ensure that these programs don’t cross the threshold into being overutilized.
4. Overutilized: The building feels crowded and the physical space really starts to negatively impact learning, be it from having too many students in individual classrooms, to having classes in spaces not meant to support that type of activity, to making scheduling classrooms very difficult and requiring teachers to teach in different spaces each hour beyond what is best practice or sustainable.