School building officials from across Saskatchewan were in North Battleford last week for the 28th annual Conference for the Council of Educational Facility Planners International.
The conference was hosted by Living Sky School Division and focused on the issues of planning, designing, building, equipping and maintaining schools and colleges.
The event took place Jan. 29 to 31 at Western Development Museum, with the Thursday session featuring a trade show and several presentations of interest.
A key theme was the hot issue of public-private partnerships and their use in the development of new facilities. That is a timely issue given the announcement by the province last fall that they planned to build nine new schools in the province under the P3 process.
The opening session focused on "P3 and 3P School Design Process in Saskatchewan and Alberta" and included group 2 Alberta representative Craig Webber and group 2 Saskatchewan representative Laura Plosz.
That session focused not only on P3s but also 3Ps - the "Lean" principle of "Production Preparation Process." 3Ps were later the focus of a session by Paul Blaser of RBM Architecture entitled LEAN - A Journey from Japan to North Battleford, with a few stops along the way.
That session focused on how the 3P process originated in manufacturing and how that concept has been adapted to areas such as the health care field and now school design.
Public-private partnerships were discussed further in an afternoon session presented by John Wheatley, director of facility planning for Rocky View School Division in Alberta.
His presentation was entitled The Alberta P3 Model From the School Jurisdiction Perspective. It mainly focused on the nuts and bolts of how the P3 model works and what the process is like for school divisions going through it, such as his own.
He highlighted some of the school designs that came about as a result of the P3 process in his school division.
Other sessions held during the day touched on topics such as the future of school design, financial analysis, controlling air leakage and maximizing mechanical system efficiency, among others.
One session focused on an issue of interest to school officials, students and parents: school security.
Bill Hedin of The Surveillance Shop presented a session on the "Importance and Advantages of Proper Electronic Security in Today's Schools."
The topic is important to school officials given shootings at schools in the United States. Closer to home, there was also an incident in Lloydminster last fall where convicted sex offender Michael Stanley removed his electronic bracelet and escaped, prompting several schools to go into lockdown in northwest and central Saskatchewan. Stanley eventually fled to and was arrested in the United States.
Hedin's presentation described some security options available designed to control access in and out of the school, such as intercom technology and security cameras. The goal of his session, he said, was to promote the conversation among school officials about what they were doing about security at their own schools.
