• Identify future-facing trends that will shape the design and delivery of learning environments.
• Analyze the barriers in current design and construction processes that prevent adaptive, inclusive, and resilient outcomes.
• Co-develop strategies to align people, practice, and place with emerging learner needs and systemic shifts.
• Commit to a personal or professional action that moves your work toward a more future-ready educational environment.

• Learning and Connection: Fostering peer to peer interaction and team building
• Access: Providing openness, variety, and choice
• Safety: Ensuring appropriate supervision and creating a shared sense of ownership
• Privacy: Defining what can be seen and heard

• Explore the evolving cultural context of changing spaces that support physical education and athletic learning settings in middle school to understand the physical, emotional, and social needs of learners using them and how inclusive design strategies may positively impact the overall learning experience.
• Hear directly from learners involved in the engagement process and capital project leadership charged to align school facilities to board policies supporting gender inclusive schools and prohibiting harassment, intimidation and bullying to promote wellbeing and safety for all students.
• Identify engagement strategies to uncover student, parent/guardian, and educator perspectives on changing spaces and integrate insights into design strategies exploring the challenges and benefits of inclusive design approaches in two new middle schools for Edmonds School District.
• Examine how inclusive design strategies for changing spaces can address student safety and mental health, by fostering environments that prevent harassment, intimidation, and bullying while ensuring appropriate supervision, privacy, and accessibility for all learners.

• Ruwan Jayaweera, PE, LEED AP, Senior Principal, PAE
• Reilly Loveland Falvey, Associate Director, New Buildings Institute

• Ruwan Jayaweera, PE, LEED AP, Senior Principal, PAE
• Anik Alam, Computational Designer, Mithun
• Tristan King, Student, BISD

• Describe the key components of a comprehensive school district climate action plan and how critical it is to hear from student voices when developing these documents.
• Explain how interactive dashboards and AI tools can engage school district constituents in a conversation on how to achieve their climate action commitments.
• Compare the types of user interfaces for carbon roadmap dashboard that support engagement with constituents that have varying requirements for access to technical data.
• Identify the back-end data and climate roadmap report contents that can support an interactive dashboard and AI interfaces.

• Understand the Role of Nutrition in Student Health and Behavior: Understanding the link between healthy student meals to improved physical health, reduced behavioral issues, and enhanced academic performance.
• Identify Key Elements of Effective Cafeteria and Kitchen Design: Learn how thoughtful design and placement of school cafeterias and kitchens can promote access to nutritious meals, encourage healthy eating habits, and support student well-being.
• Explore the Intersection of Nutrition Education and Learning Environments: Analyze how school cafeterias can serve as educational spaces where students gain practical knowledge about healthy eating and nutrition, influencing lifelong habits.
• Advocate for Holistic Approaches in Educational Space Design: Develop strategies to prioritize the integration of health, nutrition education, and equity in the planning and design of school cafeterias and kitchens, ensuring all students have access to healthy meals in a supportive environment.

• Recognize the importance of aligning educational programs with industry demands to ensure workforce readiness and community economic growth.
• Understand the key steps and processes involved in forming successful partnerships between educational institutions and local industries to address community needs and workforce development.
• Explore how innovative approaches to Career and Technical Education (CTE) can provide students with hands-on, real-world learning experiences directly related to the surrounding maritime industry in which the site is located.
• Examine how revitalizing underutilized areas through strategic partnerships can drive economic development, enhance community engagement, and create long-term value.

• Identify a process for evaluating existing school facilities for ADA compliance.
• Create actionable data for District planning and budgeting.
• Discuss the process by which the data and costs from exemplar facilities may be projected to provide costs for other District facilities.
• Show how the District will use this knowledge to improve current buildings and as a basis for more holistically inclusive future buildings.

• Evaluate the Constructability and Cost Implications of Mass Timber: Understand the advantages and challenges of using mass timber in K-12 school construction, including construction speed, cost factors, and site logistics.
• Explore the Impact of Biophilic Design on Student Learning and Well-Being: Discuss how exposed mass timber can enhance indoor environmental quality, foster inclusivity, and create engaging learning spaces that support student well-being.
• Identify Key Maintenance, Moisture Management, and Insurance Considerations: Review best practices for maintaining exposed timber, addressing moisture risks, and navigating insurance challenges associated with mass timber construction.
• Analyze the Environmental and Carbon Reduction Benefits: Examine how mass timber contributes to reducing embodied carbon, and its role in sustainable school design.

• Identify the links between responsive and flexible education space design and student engagement, excitement, learning, focus, wellbeing, autonomy and agency, accessibility and community.
• Describe the needs of the littlest of learners including: safety/security, risk-taking, relationship with technology, agency, flexibility, connections to nature, and importance of relationships.
• Discover how spaces can support and meet the needs as described above.
• Explore the overlap of these early learning principles with elementary education principles, bridging learning through ages 3-8.

• Understand the legal distinctions between bond promotion for school districts and community-based organizations in Washington State.
• Identify key dates and deadlines critical to successful bond planning and promotion.
• Explore effective district activities and community outreach strategies to garner support for bond measures.
• Develop a comprehensive bond promotion plan that aligns with legal requirements and maximizes community engagement.

• Discussion on the history of the movement for trans-exclusionary spaces and how this directly impacts K-12 education spaces as well as the health, safety, and wellbeing of all students.
• Create a shared vernacular for meaningful connection with the LGBTQ+ community to enhance engagement and understanding.
• Introduce learnings from an international survey centering the lived experience of trans, nonbinary, gender nonconforming people in built spaces and discover spatial characteristics of gender inclusive design beyond bathrooms. In addition, qualitative data from K-12 specific students to better understand the needs of those we serve.
• Provide examples of translating learnings into the built environment by analyzing case studies that support survey findings as well as spaces that could be enhanced for better gender inclusivity.

• Review the mission, training approach, and community outcomes for Sustainability Ambassadors’ Youth Leadership Development Program.
• Analyze the relationship between school district sustainability plans, city climate action plans, educating for sustainability, and youth voice.
• Identify opportunities to develop green school case studies that support engineering design thinking in the classroom.
• Integrate Green Jobs Youth Pathways with the workforce development goals of your organization.

• Learn more about strategic energy planning, and how community engagement factors into facility upgrades for tribal and indigenous communities.
• Develop an understanding of microgrid systems, including how solar photovoltaics (PV) and battery energy storage systems (BESS) can maintain critical infrastructure during an outage or natural disaster.
• Identify critical loads for emergency services that support community resilience and critical health infrastructure, using a critical load tiering approach.
• Gain an understanding of clean energy technology and trends that are advancing educational facility design.

• Develop a toolkit of outreach and engagement strategies designed to help project teams (including district leaders, planners/facilitators, and architects) create robust, community-specific educational visioning plans that reach diverse stakeholders, remove participation barriers, and encourage open and honest discussions that illuminate a path forward for future school facilities.
• Apply strategies to effectively identify—and empower—district leaders who will champion an inclusive approach to educational visioning, inspire buy-in among school communities, and serve as a trusted advisor to the planning and design team throughout the process.
• Explore equitable engagement strategies that promote authenticity, transparency, and trust as pathways to building meaningful connections with diverse stakeholders throughout planning and design—effectively overcoming traditionally extractive and transactional practices.
• Implement analysis strategies to effectively translate the stories, values, and insight gathered throughout the engagement phase into a series of corresponding guiding principles, design implications (conditions of satisfaction), and accountability frameworks that will serve as the foundation for project decision making.

• Explore six critical areas of intervention – access, entry, enclosure, hygiene, systems, and signage – for implementing safe and inclusive toilet design strategies.
• Identify scalable retrofit strategies that align with district-wide engagement findings, supporting inclusive toilet areas in existing school buildings.
• Develop assessment strategies to guide infrastructure interventions, manage construction costs, and ensure building code compliance, and incorporate toilet room upgrades into levy and bond planning.
• Understand the role of community education and communication in supporting school culture shifts before, during, and after toilet space changes, ensuring safe and respectful engagement from students, families, and staff.

• Detail the primary environmental and economic challenges facing school infrastructure and communities, including climate change impacts, financial constraints, and community well-being.
• Investigate strategies and technologies for designing resilient and future-ready educational facilities that cater to diverse community needs.
• Discuss and evaluate approaches to ensure fiscally responsible investments in school infrastructure that prioritize sustainability and long-term value.
• Participate in cross-sector collaboration between educators, district planners, and AEC professionals to generate actionable ideas for resilient and sustainable school environments.

• Developing foundations for effective teams.
• Developing strategies for forming teams.
• Developing strategies for sustaining teams over time.
• Understanding the facility impacts of teaching in teams.

• Understand Workforce and Education Trends: Analyze the declining college enrollment rates, shifting post-high school pathways, and the growing demand for skilled trades, and explore how these trends impact the future of CTE programs and facility design.
• Explore Flexible and Future-Ready CTE Models: Examine how to develop adaptable, innovative learning environments that prepare students for both current industry needs and emerging workforce demands.
• Leverage Industry Partnerships for CTE Success: Learn how collaboration with business and trade partners can inform curriculum development, identify evolving skill requirements, and shape CTE spaces that align with real-world workforce expectations.
• Apply Best Practices in CTE Facility Design: Discover strategies for designing sustainable, inclusive, and adaptable CTE spaces that foster hands-on learning, accommodate future skills evolution, and create meaningful career pathways for students.

• Map the interconnectedness between capital and technology planning.
• Define the funding sources for technology investments.
• Define the different layers of security and how architecture plays a role.
• Articulate the principles of a security system.

• Understand the principles of biophilic design and their application in educational settings.
• Identify specific biophilic interventions that can be implemented in existing classrooms without significant structural changes.
• Evaluate the impact of biophilic design on student learning and emotional outcomes based on recent research findings.
• Explore practical strategies for retrofitting classrooms to incorporate biophilic elements effectively.

• Identify opportunities for renovating existing schools to accommodate the programmatic needs of future generations.
• Identify strategies to re-use existing buildings that reduce embodied carbon.
• Understand design strategies that can respond to the unique needs of a school’s pedagogical approach and student population within the confines of an existing building.
• Understand considerations and challenges inherent in renovation projects.

Natural Connections & Considerations: The benefits to humans from establishing and nourishing interaction between the indoors and outdoors have been well documented in western science over the past two decades. It is well accepted that even casual interaction from a view or smell can have positive impacts to physiology, emotions, behavior, and learning comprehension and retention. But this is not new knowledge – it is “new” to western cultures who forgot and discarded it a long time ago in the interests of efficiency. Many Indigenous cultures continue to not just recognize the benefits of outdoor connection and learning but consider it necessary to healthy living and successful learning. Starting with the perspectives of there is no bad weather, just bad clothing, and the building is the 3rd skin, the session will explore what is needed to support outdoor learning and its inherent experiential qualities.

• Develop greater awareness of Indigenous perspectives on relationships, time, place, and our role in the natural environment.
• Learn how the Indigenous cultural and educational practices can help us develop and improve collaborative, evidence-based, and physically and culturally contextual design processes and outcomes.
• Learn how to use specific tools and activities to incorporate Indigenous perspectives and practices into the planning and design of learning environments.
• Learn how we can design and build learning environments to support best learning practices outdoors – in addition to or instead of the now-traditional indoor environments.

• Inertia is a powerful force—lasting change requires alignment between people, practices, and place.
• Clear communication is essential—without it, ideas cannot be tested, exchanged, or incorporated effectively.
• Learners, educators, and designers lack a shared language about space—bridging this gap is critical for meaningful collaboration.
• A practical spatial framework is needed—one that incorporates affordances (what a space allows its users to do) and space signals (the messages environments send to users about how they can or should interact with it).

• Understand the Three Spheres of Influence: Learn how people, practices, and place must align to create meaningful, lasting change in school design.
• Recognize the Importance of Clear Communication: Explore how misalignment in communication between designers, educators, and learners hinders effective school design and how to bridge these gaps.
• Challenge Traditional Assumptions in School Design: Examine why schools often remain fundamentally unchanged despite evolving educational needs and how we can reimagine learning environments for the future.
• Apply a Practical Design Toolbox: Discover a simple toolkit that helps designers, educators, and learners collaboratively identify architectural challenges and solutions that directly impact learning.

• Understand the intent and basics of the Clean Buildings Performance Standard (CBPS)
• Review timelines for compliance with CBPS
• Review examples of how it has been used to comply as well as update school district campuses
• Understand what steps building owners and operators need to take now to comply with and what incentives may be available

• Design for Equity and Inclusion: Identify strategies for incorporating inclusive design elements such as gender-neutral facilities, flexible learning spaces, and experiential graphics to enhance student belonging.
• Standardize with Flexibility: Apply methods to balance district-wide design standards with site-specific innovation, ensuring consistency in educational quality while allowing for adaptable, future-forward solutions.
• Streamline Multi-Site Project Management: Implement best practices in state approvals, delivery method selection, and procurement strategies to optimize cost efficiency and project timelines for complex, multi-site developments.
• Advance Climate-Responsive School Design: Evaluate sustainable building strategies, including mass timber construction and all-electric campus models, to reduce environmental impact while meeting long-term energy goals.

• Fair and Equitable Access: We are working to identify a fair and equitable process that will serve to prioritize funding requests based on specific attributes such as facility condition and age, school district financial factors such as property valuations, debt capacity and size, and unique project conditions such as seismic or tsunami risks.
• Identifying Formula Improvements: Through careful analysis and case study development, we will make recommendations to existing funding formulas that may include such factors as market price construction and regional cost differences, space allowance to meet current and future instructional requirements, local district context such as property tax rates and median household income and the use of prototypical designs.
• Improving SCAP’s Efficiency: We are examining ways to streamline administrative processes, reduce potential redundancies, and explore new methods for funding distribution that could lead to overall programmatic efficiencies.