Celebrating Our Future

The Park Campus Master Plan: Building on 171’s Visionary Foundations by Peter M. Barkan ’86

I was a skinny first-grader when I first walked through the doors into The Park School. It was the start of the seventh year on Goddard Avenue. The complex Brutalist building was the biggest and most overwhelming building I’d ever explored. There were endless rooms, corridors, stairwells, and a rumor of secret tunnels. Walking from our classroom all the way to the Dining Room was an exciting excursion, and venturing beyond the stone wall towards the Faulkner House seemed like a trip to Narnia. The walls popped with all the colors of Starburst candies. At that time, the driveway meandered through ancient pine and maple trees, and it provided a comforting boundary between the castle and the wild beyond. Park’s technology footprint was only two PET 64 computers secured in crude plywood carrels. The scene in most classes would be 17 kids facing the chalkboard, flipping pages in a workbook, and occasionally watching a movie…on real film. Our backpacks were very, very heavy.

A lot has changed in the 43 years since my first day. I went on to three more campuses, learned a bit about Brutalist architecture, and I’m no longer intimidated by the “wild beyond.” I have also experienced Park’s carpool as a parent, and yes, I’ve actually been in the secret tunnels.

In the 50 years at Goddard Avenue, Park’s community has grown by about 200 students, and shortened by one grade level. Park’s World Languages offerings have expanded from French and Latin to include Spanish and Mandarin, and the program includes STEAM, extensive athletics, and a focus on social-emotional growth. Technology swelled in the 2000’s to fill three dedicated computer labs, and then shrank down into the fingertips of our youngest students. Learning has become collaborative, self-directed, and supported by endless technology-enabled resources. The roadway now crowds the buildings and hosts a twice-daily gridlock of harried parents. Backpacks are still heavy.

Park’s campus has been adapted extensively to always meet Park’s mission to provide excellence in education and a joyful environment. The School added the West Building and the bridge in 1996 to provide science labs, more classrooms and a double gymnasium. Then, in 2008, we added the North Wing as part of a strategy to enlarge the number of students at each grade level while also reducing the number of students in each classroom. We’ve also acquired eight precious acres of woodlands and three houses.

The flexible new Dining Commons will become a focal point of campus.

Acquiring the additional land in 2012 was the impetus for creating a Campus Master Plan to evaluate our infrastructure against the state-of-the-art in educational institutions. For more than a year, we engaged with faculty, parents, students, coaches, and a wonderful team of outside experts to dive deeply into our infrastructure and our vision of the Whole Child, which prioritizes a child’s full developmental needs to help them reach their fullest potential. More importantly, we looked at the trajectory of academics, social-emotional learning, and athletics to ensure we would remain a leading independent school for the next fifty years. The resulting Campus Master Plan guides how Park can reshape, repurpose, and expand our facilities to meet our goals in both the short-term and long-term. Among the key insights that emerged in the process were:

1. Learning requires larger, more flexible spaces where teachers can guide collaborative learning, rather than delivering content.

2. Learning spaces include classrooms as well as lounges, collaboration spaces, hallways, nooks, gardens, fields, and the “wild beyond.”

3. Children need a sense of their “home” in the building, and a progression through different homes as they advance through the grades.

Every member of the community should easily access the myriad environments, resources, and discoveries across our 34 acre campus. (…but not the secret tunnels.)

An example of the Campus Master Plan being realized is progress towards an indoor-outdoor, analog-digital Maker Wing where learners can problem-solve and create whatever they imagine with the latest technology, materials, and tools. This began to be realized in 2019 when the Makerspace was built in the North Wing to support project-based learning, design thinking and coding. Next summer, the adjacent room will become a woodshop where students learn the tangible side of engineering. When the roadway is reconfigured in a later construction phase, this Maker “classroom” will extend seamlessly to the learning garden, fields, and the woodlands behind the School.

Another sequence of projects in the early phases of the Master Plan is updating our classroom portfolio. During the summer of 2021, the School converted underutilized locker-room space and nine small classrooms into eleven large, right-sized classrooms as well as two grade-level homes. These renovations have also provided optimized spaces for counseling, secondary-school advising, fitness education, and other specialties that are essential to a Park experience.

The work planned for summer 2022 is very exciting. Inside the building, we will renovate the Lower Division science rooms, and the Lower Division art/woodshop spaces. Out on the campus, we will create a multipurpose outdoor-education complex in the Faulkner fields. This will add a competition-size turf field and a ropes course next to our existing pool and Faulkner playground. This will immediately generate a magnetism towards the West side of the campus for competitive athletics, experiential education, after-school programming, and summer learning. The next part—and what I’m most excited about—will come a few years later when we will build a new dining commons off the rear side of the Main Building. Eventually, this will allow us to eliminate the roadway loop behind the buildings. The result will be Park’s own Emerald Necklace of indoor and outdoor spaces stretching all the way from the Library to the furthest tip of the North Fields. The community will be able to experience the entire campus and all its learning spaces, gardens, fields, woods and streams. Cars will be safely contained in the roadways and parking lots at the front of the buildings, and carpool should get easier.

Eventually, we’ll be able to redesign the traffic pattern at Park. Cars will be contained in the driveways and parking lots at the front of the building, leaving the rest of campus free from congestion.

Throughout the work to date, there has been an intense focus on achieving a modern, joyful aesthetic. While I’m an alum of Park’s original color scheme, the new spaces feature calm colors and backgrounds to the work of learning and connecting. With lots of glass, LED lighting, renewable textiles, and durable finishes, we’re seeking the best environmental profile possible in all our designs. Of course, all the new spaces are accessible, have gender-neutral restrooms, current technology capabilities, and updated life-safety features.

The flexible new Dining Commons will become a focal point of campus.

The past 50 years on Goddard Avenue have taught us that the Park School experience is constantly evolving. Programs change, the student body changes, and the approach to learning changes. The Campus Master Plan anticipates that evolution by providing rightsized spaces, sensible flow through the buildings, and connection to the myriad elements in Park’s amazing campus. I’m grateful to Kimberly Boyd, Assistant Head of School for Finance & Operations, for her outstanding partnership on this project. Above all, I am proud to build upon the vision of those who brought us to Goddard Avenue 50 years ago, and to leave Park with a vision of how to continue growing with our campus long into the future. The investment of time and money in recent years on the early phases of renovation have already proven the merit of this vision and our ability to achieve it.

An architectural rendering of the new Dining Commons, as imagined from the interior view.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Peter M. Barkan ’86 is the CEO of the Barkan Companies, a regional competitor in multifamily real estate development, property management, and affordable housing. A parent of two Park students and a member of Park’s Board since 2016, Peter chairs the Buildings & Grounds Committee, serves as Secretary, and led the Master Planning Committee.