Designed for young thinkers: The construction of Mar Jok Elementary School

Designed for young thinkers

The construction of Mar Jok Elementary School

By Tammy Schuster

Dusty chalkboards, small metal desks, and cold drafty classrooms. The learning environment of the past is, well, a thing of the past.

Mar Jok Elementary School in the city of West Kelowna is an example of the collaborative learning environments of the future. During the design and construction of the one-year-old school, it was also an example of a collaborative working environment.

Opened last fall, the K-6 school was designed to incorporate 21st century learning principles – a more tailored style of teaching promoting digital literacy, critical thinking, and problem solving.

Classrooms were built with moveable partitions and sliding doors to accommodate different methods of teaching. Whether it’s a one-on-one lesson, a small group session, or several classrooms combined together.

“This school was designed with flexibility and adaptably in mind,” says Todd Dust, architect from Thinkspace and lead architect on this project.

“Rather than the stand-and-deliver model where people would stand in front of a class and lecture, it’s more flexible giving kids the ability to learn in the way they are most comfortable.“

Dust says this method of teaching had to be reflected in the design of the school. Schools are typically designed with double-loaded corridors, meaning there are classrooms on either side of each corridor. Corridors were not used in the design of Mar Jok. Instead, pods were created.

The two-storey school has pods on both levels that house four to five classrooms. Those pods open up onto the learning commons allowing for further flexibility. All the classrooms can open up and expand into that space.

“There is no hiding in hallways,” says Alida Privett, principal of Mar Jok Elementary School. “There are no hallways.” She says students are less distracted because they have become used to working with constant movement and activity in the common spaces and classrooms.

The open design and natural light makes for a more comfortable learning space for students and teachers, and makes the building more energy efficient.

“Mar Jok Elementary is designed

for movement, collaboration, visibility and open learning,” says Privett. “Each learning community consists of four or five classes of students in a similar age range, and teachers work as teaching and learning partners.”

Because the school was designed to target LEED Gold certification, the architects utilized a geo-thermal heat source – pulling warmth from the ground beneath the structure in order to regulate the temperature for the building, which is where the majority of energy savings come from.

LEED (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) is an internationally recognized rating system used to rank high-performance green buildings.

Adhering to the LEED standard of environmental design meant using resources from within a 500-mile radius. Dust said some wood products were manufactured two blocks away, while others came in from Bellingham, Washington. Because of its energy-efficient design, the school won a Green Award in the Commercial Building Awards 2015 from the Southern Interior Construction Association in October of this year.

One of the bigger challenges Dust and his team faced with the school design was the expansive envelope surface. Because the school has a twostorey component, a one-storey component, plus a double-height component, the large-surface area created a potential for heat loss. But Dust says they mitigated that with a more energyefficient mechanical system.

This led to another challenge; the mechanical system had to be very specific because a school doesn’t want to have to go within to work on it. Dust says they utilized a crawl space to accommodate all of the mechanical system and were able to feed it through to the upper floors.

The construction site chosen for the school was a gravel pit next to a spillway used for the controlled let down of the Rose Valley Dam. Being within a flood plain covenant, the team had to build 1.5 metres above the high-water level.

“That was one of the biggest challenges from a bureaucracy standpoint,” says Dust. We didn’t actually have approval to build on site until the day before the contractor showed up.”

But the biggest challenge for all parties was the strict time constraint. “The school had to be open for September 2014, and we didn’t receive permits from the municipality until July 2013,” says John-Erik Grain, project manager for School District #23 at the time of construction. “That meant we had to construct a LEED Gold equivalent school in 13 months.”

Grain says with construction projects of this nature this would be an unrealistic scenario unless everyone, including the contractor, consultant and owner – worked together.

Kevin Imthorn, vice-president of Sawchuk Developments Co. Ltd. and project manager overseeing the school construction agrees. “The school had to be open, ready for students and staff by August,” he says. “This included not only the two-storey school, complete with basement, but also the gymnasium, the geo-exchange field under the soccer field, the parking lot, the landscaping, and off-site improvements.”

He says this was no small feat considering most of the structural work had to be completed through the winter months.

“This project could not have been as successful without the team attitude of the architect and the owners’ project manager,” says Imthorn. “It was this extraordinary approach that ensured total project success.”

And, because the team collaborated under that severe timeline, Mar Jok Elementary School opened its large glass doors to approximately 450 students in the fall of 2014. “It’s truly 21st century learning,” says Privett. “And it’s never quiet.” b