Perryville Elementary Brainstorms Future Renovations

Perryville Elementary will undergo significant renovations in 2015, and on Wednesday, staff and other community members brainstormed what the new and improved school could look like.

“We want to capture your vision of what the school would be,” said Jim Hutchison, executive director of Studio JAED, which will design plans for the project.

More than 60 people participated in what Hutchison called a “pre-design” meeting, held in the media center at the school.

Participants gave input through two exercises.

The first involved selecting cards depicting what people thought the school should symbolize.

“We want to try to get an image and maybe a few key words that can help the design team with the vision you’re looking for,” Hutchison instructed.

Attendees picked pictures including a seedling and water, among others. They used words like "foundation" and "beginning" to explain what they associated about the picture with the school. The images are attached with this article.

"You never know what people see," said Hutchison, whose firm designed the cards.

"It we can distill a vision that can be related in a picture or couple of words, that really gets the design off to a good start," Hutchison said after the presentation.

To learn what visions people might have, he said his team researches the area, the district and the school, before meeting with the group.

Since 75 percent of his firm's work is with institutions serving kindergarten through twelfth grade, Hutchison said his team is well versed in these types of projects.

"What you don't want is for the design team to be trying to figure out what everybody wants and then coming and giving a design that we have to defend," Hutchison explained. "What we prefer to do is let the community and the school drive the design at every step."

Along those lines, the second exercise was called "experience mapping." In it, groups of attendees were asked to get in the mentality of a parent, teacher, YMCA client or other stakeholder who may use the school for a specific purpose.

Step by step, the groups mapped out how they would arrive at the front door and where they would need to go in the school, suggesting tweaks for the design along the way.

Common requests included a clearly lit parking lot, covered entryway and designated waiting areas inside the school.

At the end of the two-hour brainstorm, Perry Willis, executive director of support services/facilities for Cecil County Public Schools, reminded attendees that the project was not starting right away, as there was still funding to be secured.

"...for actually starting to bust this building up and dig dirt, we can't start at the earliest until July 1 of next year," Willis said. He noted that construction would take approximately 24 months.