Gensler, WXY, PSF Projects, PBDW, SITU, and Urban Projects Collaborative have come together with Brooklyn Laboratory Charter Schools (LAB) to develop a toolkit that explores ideas for how school layouts and operating procedures might change in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Specifically, the guide is geared toward re-designing the entry sequences at schools to allow for increased coronavirus testing, required social distancing, and for the safe travel between home and school for children. The adaptations are also geared toward reworking the sidewalks and spaces immediately around school entrances in order to accommodate the long lines that will result as new, slower arrival procedures are implemented for students.

Additionally, the guide offers approaches for establishing social distancing within the classroom, ways of providing overhead covering for queuing students, adaptation strategies for stairwells and corridors, and other approaches. The full set of proposals can be accessed here. 

In an announcement highlighting the toolkit, WXY leaders Claire Weisz, FAIA, and Adam Lubinsky, PhD, AICP, write that the tool kit shows school and community leaders "how to map a journey from home to school that integrates new requirements for health and safety.

The firm, which often undertakes robust community engagement efforts as part of its multi-faceted projects, has helped create a "model arrival-and-entry process to facilitate the transition of students and staff into the building, taking into account specific egress challenges that LAB and many other schools will face when they reopen," the statement reads.

"All reopening preparation must consider the needs of medically fragile family members, individuals with disabilities, people of color, and other groups who have been disproportionately affected by the consequences of the pandemic," said Eric Tucker, co-founder and executive director, LAB. Tucker added, "We are sharing this tool kit not only to solicit feedback on an early version of our own approach to reopening at LAB, but to provide a collaborative framework for conversations with schools across the country."

The tool kit is one of several preliminary spatial adaptation approaches that have been developed by architecture firms and the American Institute of Architects in the months since the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in the United States.