[NOTE – THE DESIGN DISCUSSED BELOW IS OUT OF DATE. IT WAS IMPROVED SIGNIFICANTLY AND THE IMPROVEMENT WAS POSTED ON OUR HOME PAGE ON 2.26.2020. WE ARE LEAVING THIS SECTION HERE FOR HISTORICAL PURPOSES ONLY]
We’ve put Rolf’s full powerpoint below. To help you navigate, we have a couple words up front.
Rolf Silbert is known to our community as an active leader, coach, etc. He’s also a professional mechanical design engineer with a knack for solving tough problems, including community problems. He put a ton of thought into his design. Here are are some quick observations:
Rolf’s design doesn’t change, add, shrink, or remove ANY facilities from the November 20, 2020 school design. He left everything the district wanted for educational purposes.
Rolf nonetheless improves on the school’s design in key respects:
- improves student safety with a better fire and emergency design, vetted by the experts
- improves drop-off and pick-up traffic flow and safety, while at the same time reducing the traffic queue on Boquita even more than the district’s new design would
- provides numerous new walking and other non-vehicle entry and exit points into the school, both improving safety exits in a crisis, and fulfilling the board’s written goal of encouraging student exercise by providing more walking paths to school
- increases fields from 78,000 square feet (January school design) to 130,400 square feet (30,000 square feet less than the 160,000 square feet existing today)
[UPDATE: Rolf’s slides were created before the district’s January design update, and therefore use the district’s old field size number of 59,000 sf.]
Rolf’s design does all this without compromising the key objectives of the school’s current design:
- no change in any buildings
- single story design
- retains doubled parking capacity and long drop-off and pick-up queue
- no change in 30′ MUR with ocean views
One reason we think this design deserves consideration by all of us is that it attacks 2 of the 3 key problems we had previously identified in the current school design. It both removes the gratuitous “community park” and uses existing infrastructure on Mira Montana to share the load of parking, drop-off, and pick-up during the few minutes each day where those occur. You can see in our image below of the January 2020 DMUSD site design that Rolf attacked the 17,000 square foot problem and the 44,000 square foot problem, both of which we believe are extremely poor trades for less field space.
Rolf’s powerpoint below explains the design in detail.
To orient you, the presentation starts by identifying the district’s redesign goals, then shows how the district’s new school design falls short on safety, drop-off and pick-up, and playfield space. He then shows how his alternative design is a substantial improvement in each of these areas – plus environmentally superior by leveraging already existing community infrastructure.
Play Outside Del Mar 