---

An alternative high school with a career focus finds a new home in an urban setting, and students welcome the role of caretaker.

Gresham's Alpha High School/Photos by Uwe Schneider, Courtesy Dull Olson Weekes Architects

By Catherine Paglin

GRESHAM, Oregon—Alpha High School has no gym, no cafeteria, no field, no football team, no banging metal lockers, no teachers' lounge, no library, no squeaky chalkboards, no bells, and no long dark hallways. It doesn't look or sound like a school, and that's the way the students and teachers like it.

"We really designed it as a business, not as a school," says Principal Tom Dearborn. "The first time I addressed students in the space I said, 'Does this look like a school?' and everyone said 'No!' and I said 'Good, we were successful.'"

The 16,000-square-foot building that houses this school-to-work program in Gresham, Oregon, has garnered state and national awards for its beauty and functionality. Located in what is planned as a dense, mixed-use downtown area along a light-rail line, the school has only 13 parking spaces; 75 percent of its students use public transportation. Trees, benches, a setback at the entryway, large ground-floor windows, and window bays give the building a human scale and connect it to the street scene. Its interior is bathed in natural light emanating from high windows in its central, two-story commons.

Alpha High School's design has won many awards for the Portland architectural firm Dull Olson Weekes, which specializes in school architecture. Honors include: American Institute of Architects National Committee on Architecture in Education Honor Award; Governor's Livability Award Special Mention; American School Business Officials Certificate of Excellence; American School and University Magazine Outstanding Design Award; Council of Educational Facility Planners International Project of Distinction Award; City of Gresham Community Design Excellence Award; and International Interior Design Association Merit Award. In November 2000, Alpha's lead architect Norm Dull presented the project at the Innovative Alternatives in Learning Environments Conference in Amsterdam.

Alpha students are proud of the newness, cleanliness, and businesslike look of their prize-winning building. "It's more pro-fess-ion-al," says one, enjoying each syllable. Others say the building is "relaxing" and feels like "a second home." That's not surprising considering that students were involved in the building's conception: Two Alpha students worked at the architects' office during the design phase and helped shape the appearance and function of the school.

"They offered so much insight into the needs and the thinking, the colors, materials, the responsibility students were willing to take on," says Dull. "We were hesitating putting wood railings in because we were thinking kids would start carving them up. They said, 'Give us some credit. If you give us a nice building, we're not going to tear it up.'" The architects also discovered that students were not as interested in having a student lounge as having "little places." Thus they took small corners that were neither classroom nor office and made them into cozy spaces with couches for studying or casual conversation.

"Flexibility" is the word and concept used most often when Alpha staff and students describe their new building. "The way the school is designed it's almost malleable to our needs," says senior John Albi.

Those needs are many. Alpha's 130 students don't have a typical schedule of six or eight class periods. Half the students are in the building in the morning, half in the afternoon. When they're not at school they're at job sites gaining job readiness skills and exposure to career options. "We don't generally have all of our kids here at once," says Dearborn. Nonetheless, he adds, the design team realized that the school needed a space that was large enough to accommodate a general assembly of those students, but would not go unused the rest of the time. As well, he says, teachers needed to be able both to combine their classes for team teaching and to break up classes into many small working groups. And the Multnomah Education Service District, which runs Alpha, wanted the building to be available and usable for community groups in the evening.

At first it seemed as if the Alpha building would have to be huge to meet all these needs, says Dull. "Because of the restrictions on the site and on the budget, it became obvious that we had to become more innovative." That's where the idea of movable walls and mobile cabinetry came in. Alpha's multipurpose commons area and the adjacent classrooms can all be made bigger or smaller through an innovative system of moving walls. Tables, cabinets, and student "cubbies" are easily rolled out of the way as room configurations change. Because the space is always changing, teachers have offices instead of their own, permanent classrooms. They can roll carts with student work back and forth from office to classroom.

Remembering the flimsy, difficult-to-use accordion walls popular early in his 31-year education career, Dearborn had some concerns when the subject of moving walls arose. "When you deal as we do with special students and students who aren't always focused on a curriculum presentation to begin with, then you need to cut out as much distraction as you can," he says. But the operable partitions between classroom and the moving walls that flank the common space are two-and-a-half inches thick and, though they weigh 15 pounds per square foot, glide smoothly on ball-bearing rollers. "When they're in place," says Dearborn, "you can have a video going on one side and a conversation happening on the other, and it's not soundproof but it's not distracting."

To promote safe and appropriate behavior, the school's administrative "hub" is located across the commons from the classrooms. From there the staff can see students coming and going from classrooms on both floors, as well as entering and leaving the building.

"In the '50s the schools were one story, spread out along long corridors, and generally those corridors were separate. So it left a lot of isolated space for students to do whatever, and we knew we didn't want that to happen," says Dearborn.

The open, two-story Alpha design, however, has its own potential trouble spots. Dearborn admits to feeling "really paranoid" when he first stood on the second floor and looked down into the common space. "This is open. Who's going to see how far they can jump?" he wondered. But his fears have been unfounded. "The kids have been really appropriate," he says.

Alpha's teachers praise the building and find it supports their work with students. "It's a dream because of all the flexibility, the newness, the openness," says Terry Gerber, who is in his 11th year and third building at Alpha. Gerber team teaches entry-level students with another staff member. They often begin the week by removing all the partitions between the four first-floor seminar rooms to discuss the week's work. Then they break down into groups. He says, "With the walls as movable as they are, they allow us many, many configurations whether we want to set up small groups of six or seven or even smaller groups of two or three."

Alpha has no computer lab that would require an extra staff person as a monitor. With wall panels positioned appropriately, teachers can easily keep track of students at computers just outside the classroom on the perimeter of the commons. "One of the reasons we have the computers out here," says Gerber, "is that we want the students to feel as if they're in more of a professional atmosphere. The other reason is that we have guests all the time. We want them to see students at work, and we want the students to interrelate."

As well as going out to job sites, Alpha students can get job site experience at school in an in-house video production lab and a "business lab" where businesses can come to the building and set up shop temporarily. This exposure is particularly important for younger students who usually don't have much idea of what job sites they would like to go to, says Dearborn. The lab, which doubles as a science room, is equipped with stainless-steel-topped movable tables, air, gas, chemical hoods, chemical storage, and a roll-up door. "We had an engineer come in and with 10 students did a miniclass on bridge design as a job site," says Dearborn. "Then they built a footbridge the City of Troutdale needed in their park system."

Completed in 1999, the Alpha building cost $2.3 million including fixtures, furnishings, and the moving walls. Multnomah Education Service District financed the building by selling 10-year certificates of participation. "We were renting space, and the cost of the space continued to grow while the space continued to stay the same or get worse," says Dearborn. "So we were getting less and less for the money we were paying. By looking at our cost for housing the program over a 10-year period, we could say it's cheaper to build." Alpha was expensive per square foot, he says, but well worth the money. "We're serving a population that, if not served, would probably end up costing a lot of money down the road."

Alpha's educational mission and its new building fit both a regional economic development vision and Gresham's urban design goals, says Shelly Parini, Business Assistance Program Manager with the city's Community and Economic Development department. Recently, regional leaders completed a vision statement that focused on building community wealth through "smart growth, smart kids, and smart industries," she says. As well, the city's downtown is being designed as a complete community where people can "live, work, play, and learn."

"To have a school that has synergy with existing industries that are training and grooming the future labor force, to have it on the light-rail and bus lines which opens up even more workforce opportunities, and to do it all in a safe, conveniently located neighborhood environment," says Parini, "you can't get any more perfect than that."

Respond to this article