Factory-built schools save money

John Bingham walked through the carpeted halls of the administration building on the Marysville Secondary Campus.

A handful of school officials from central Washington followed him. They felt the walls, tapped the floor and snapped photos of the hallway, which like the three schools that surround it, was built in a factory.

"You don't have that drumming you normally get when you walk into a portable," said Bingham, capital projects director for the Marysville School District. "People don't want to feel like they're in portables."

When the Marysville Secondary Campus opened last spring, it made history as the first major public school project built from manufactured housing in Washington. Except for the gymnasium, which was built from the ground up, the entire campus was constructed in a factory and trucked to its home on the Tulalip Reservation.

The three schools on the site - Tenth Street middle school, Heritage High School and Marysville Arts & Technology High School - were built much faster and cheaper than traditional schools, Bingham said. And the state doesn't count portable classrooms when it determines funding for school construction. That means these classrooms won't affect the amount of state funding the Marysville district can qualify for in the future.

Since the campus has opened, Bingham has led more than a dozen groups from school districts across the state on tours of the modular schools and the Marysville factory where they were built. The tour now also includes a stroll through Grove Elementary, which opened in September that combined a "stick-built" portion with eight portables camouflaged into the design. The district tried to make the portable classrooms mirror rooms in the "stick-built" portion and even surrounded them with bricks to make them blend in. The district owns the design plans for Grove and plans to replicate the layout in future schools, Bingham said.

The financial advantages to manufactured housing are substantial. Construction is cheaper and the state doesn't factor portables into districts' construction funding formula. So, for example, if the secondary campus contained conventional schools instead of modular ones, the district wouldn't qualify for as much state funding for future construction projects.

School funding laws were crafted with the traditional brick-and-mortar schools in mind. Because of the Marysville Secondary Campus and moves by other districts away from traditional new schools to classrooms in leased spaces or public-private partnerships, the Office of Superintendent of Public Instruction is considering rewording the laws, said Jeanne Rynne, OSPI's regional coordinator for Northwest Washington.

"This is the first time OSPI has come across this type of structure in K-12, so we're still figuring it out," she said. "We haven't come up with a firm stance one way or another, but I think we're going to have to look at that. It's obviously out there now."

The district is paying the secondary campus's $25 million price tag with mitigation fees builders pay when they develop land.

Inspired by the secondary campus and looking to cut down on costs, the Warden School District in central Washington is thinking about using manufactured housing to construct a new cafeteria and locker rooms.

"I love it," said Warden Superintendent Sandra Sheldon, after touring the secondary campus Friday. "The thing that's really hard to express to people unless they see it, is that it's modular, but it's not like the old portables. Everybody thinks of modular as the old portables and everyone knows that's not the best teaching space."

When designing the schools, Marysville administrators tried to create spaces that didn't seem like manufactured housing. One-third of the public school students in Marysville attend class in the district's 110 portables, said Jim Baker, executive director of finance. Administrators wanted the secondary campus to feel different, he said.

They upgraded from the standard materials and designed portables that fit together to make schools with open spaces, bathrooms and locker rooms. The four buildings on the campus are made up of a total of more than 200 portables. Like traditional schools, they are expected to last 30 years before they need a major renovation, Baker said.

"I totally expect this facility to be around just as long as a conventionally built building," he said, as he walked through Marysville Arts & Technology High School.

Baker and Bingham know that many people look down on manufactured housing, but they insist the secondary campus isn't second-rate.

The proof is in the schools, they say.