As we think about changing spaces, one of the commentaries that I often hear about in
terms of school buildings is if Rip Van Winkle were to awaken from his nap and return to
America, one of the things that he would recognize and probably the only thing would be the American
school building. The current model of cells and bells is really about more of a 19th century
education model where it's efficient. We have students in classrooms in rows and they're just
sitting there sort of intaking information from the teacher. Having that room look the same as
it did when we were in more of a lecture type system I think kind of lends itself to why we
need to move away from that mentality because how we teach kids just doesn't fit with that anymore.
A lot of these classrooms go back to that cells and bells kind of model so I think for a future
and for updating if we could make spaces more open and more like real life rather than just closed
off and compartmentalized. As we think about spaces of the future we have to really go back and look
at the core educational strategies and what is it that we really want kids to know and be able to
do and then build our spaces around that. And we want to kind of give give the building the look to
match all the expectations that are going on right now. I think technology is becoming such an
integral part into our day even at elementary level. Students today are really expected to know
and to do many many different things that that we growing up didn't have to do or were expected to
do but they're doing it in spaces that were really designed for the 1970s the 1980s. They're
expected to graduate into a world that's very technology oriented that's very collaborative
and they're learning and doing things in spaces that were not designed to accommodate that kind
of learning and that kind of interaction between student to student and teacher to student.
Indiana public schools need flexible learning spaces they need places where students can
collaborate working in small groups and large groups the ability to be able to be free not be
it in a desk all day long we have apps we have games we have so many different things that didn't
exist in education even 10 years ago and to think where we'll be in a few years we need the
ability to be flexible. By renovating and remodeling our schools it gives us an opportunity to
think differently about how we use staff and how each staff has different strengths and how we can
best use those strengths and the the current model of just one teacher for 29 kids I think is
somewhat outdated in the sense that we have a lot of excellent teachers that we like to share all
of their abilities and I think that this allows us to think differently about how we use our
time talent and space that we have at Indiana and how we can best serve the kids with all of that
time talent and space that we have and then it's just not locked into one teacher with one set of
kids and that's it. We have an opportunity to expand the STEM areas and with when it comes to
engineering we need expanded spaces and this is an opportunity for edinus schools to become a leader
in this area. I think that it's really just gonna allow every student to optimize the resources that
are available to them whereas now you know a lot of the teaching you have to go at the teacher's
pace in the future with a lot of these new spaces and just how classrooms are structured it allows
the student to go at their own pace you know optimize their learning which just really allows
for a lot better comprehension of the material and in the end greater learning and success. Students
just sitting at a desk it's great for some situations and for some times but other times kids
just like adults we all prefer to work in different places in different ways. In a more
collaborative environment kids can definitely find other kids to work with and other strengths and
not just always feel so. This is who I am as a math student and this is the only time I see these
kids they get to see you all day long and teachers get to see you all day long in different roles too.
As a parent of a kindergarten me and down in public schools it's exciting to think how my
daughter will learn. She will not learn the way that I learned she will learn in her own way
because she's learning skills in which we haven't even know what kind of job she's going to be
developed for so to have the opportunity to think that this referendum and what it could do for our
schools is to be able to advance that and advance her learning in a different way in which I've never
even been able to teach.
