Planning Rationale
Chicago Public Schools (CPS) serves over 361,000 students in approximately 631 schools. CPS is the nation’s third largest school district. CPS is committed to being the premier urban school district in the country by providing all of our students and their families with high quality instruction, outstanding academic programs, and comprehensive student development support to prepare them for the challenges of the world of tomorrow. That commitment includes providing the optimal learning environment, building educational capacity and choice into our system, using resources efficiently, and interacting positively with the communities in which CPS schools reside. At their core, the buildings must be warm, safe and dry.
The standards outlined within these guidelines are based on decades of experience with the design, construction and maintenance of our over 631 campuses and more than 1,100 buildings. We design facilities, choose systems and materials that optimize our buildings, have longevity, reduce maintenance, and provide appealing and functional spaces that encourage learning and make our students proud. The parameters identified within these design guidelines establish the minimum design requirements that must be met by the design professionals. The City of Chicago Building Codes and standards may take precedence over these requirements, however, where these requirements exceed those of local code and recognized industry standards, these CPS standards will take precedence.
These commitments translate into the following goals for new construction:
- Durable Buildings – High quality, easily maintainable materials built to last
- Healthy Buildings – Designed to provide a productive learning environment for students and staff, promote a healthy lifestyle and high levels of air quality, water quality, thermal comfort, and light quality. Provide as much daylighting as possible, protect against outdoor and indoor noises with proper acoustics, and meet fire and life safety monitoring standards.
- Sustainable Buildings – Sustainable buildings rely on a fully integrated whole-building approach to design, construction, and operational practices that optimize environmental and economic performance, increased efficiencies, saving energy, water, and other resources, provide quality indoor spaces, designed, constructed, and operated through fully integrated processes, systems and teams and educate occupants about efficiency and conservation.
- Community Focused Buildings – Providing for use of buildings by members of the community in addition to use by the students.
- Safe Buildings – Providing secure learning environments
- Buildings Usable by All – Employment of Universal Design principles to remove all barriers to teaching, learning, and enjoying accessible school buildings
- Technology - Investments in long-term district priorities to ensure every school has access to state-of-the-art digital learning tools.
- Learning Models - Buildings should be flexible to support a range of different types of learning models and academic programming