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In Santa Ana, School Engagement Helps Us Reach More People
by: Dana Vollmer-Grant, Assoc. AIA, WELL AP, CBSM
TOPICS DISCUSSED:
In ELS’ public sessions for recreation projects, we’ll often hear strong, valid opinions on neighborhood concerns like noise, lights, or traffic; extensive and valuable input also comes from sports teams and clubs. Aquatics
Architecture
Community Engagement
Equity
But those sources don’t always add up to a community’s collective voice. For such projects, one of our key objectives is to find the populations that, for a whole host of factors—whether age, race, income, language, physical capacity, internet access, education, or mistrust of certain institutions—are underrepresented in the community engagement process. Then we strive to bring them into the design effort and gather their ideas. In Santa Ana, we’ve seen that happen during our work on a new aquatic center, planned for the city’s Memorial Park.
Early in the community engagement process, we saw that we just weren’t hearing enough from people with children and from the children themselves. Yet integrating young voices is essential, especially because the center will be used so heavily by kids. Together with the city’s Public Works and Parks and Recreation staff, we took steps that were unprecedented in our process—and it’s gone so well that it sets a new benchmark for a big piece of our engagement work.
Students from McFadden Institute of Technology participating in a collaborative design session with ELS. At top: Dana Vollmer-Grant and student participants from Washington Elementary School.
It’s always a good idea to meet people where they are. In this case, that meant communicating directly with five schools in the area, starting with each school’s principal and working outward, from teachers to students and, through emails sent by the school, parents. We also offered an in-person presentation with city staff introducing the project and its programming possibilities, to be given during assembly and supported by Spanish translators; for our online and printed materials, we offered versions in English, Vietnamese, and Spanish. For schools where in-person presentations weren’t ideal, we filmed a brief video version, which we then sent to teachers who instructed students in filling out surveys. At one school, we made a lunchtime visit to help students take surveys on laptops and their own phones. At another (Washington Elementary, located directly across from Memorial Park), we timed an assembly presentation to coincide with a monthly parent meeting so that my team and I could talk with parents and students together on the same day. As a bonus, the school community got to see and wear my gold medals from the 2004, 2012, and 2016 Olympic Games, furthering the inspiration for aquatic activities.
Working at the intersection of schools, students, and parents has numerous benefits. When young learners give us essential input on what design elements they’d like to use, they grow genuinely excited to see it move forward, giving them a stake in the project’s outcome well before it’s even completed. Collaborative efforts like these are how kids become active participants in shaping their community, says the principal of Washington Elementary, Steve Bayouk, M.Ed. “This approach aligns seamlessly with the ethos of community schools, which emphasize fostering a sense of belonging, civic responsibility, and empowerment among our students, ensuring that education becomes a catalyst for positive change in their lives and the community at large.”
This project even became a case study for architecture students at a nearby high school, the McFadden Institute of Technology, where we had a collaborative design session exploring how the center’s key elements could be reconfigured throughout the park to maximum effect.
Incorporating just five of Santa Ana’s schools into our public engagement process led to a phenomenal number of completed surveys—some 500% higher than what we normally see for a project of this scale. Schools aggregate so much of a community into a single network, and relying on their resources allows us to leap past a project’s standard communication barriers, whether those might relate to language or location or income. Not only that, many parents don’t have the free time to attend public meetings. By working our process into something already embedded in their routine, we get to hear from people we wouldn’t otherwise hear from. Instead of them coming to us for engagement, we bring the engagement to them. It’s easy to see how this approach helps us reach a wider swath of the community and underserved demographics in particular.
The city benefits from a more extensive process too. With more information, officials can better assess how their cost-recovery model will work in reality, through partnerships with the school and through summer camps, swim lessons for all ages, and swim teams. For projects like this one, we work to foster a symbiotic relationship between cities and schools to support the entire city, from its wider community to schoolkids and their parents.
An aerial render showing Phase 1 of the Santa Ana Memorial Park Master Plan and Aquatic Center.
Initially, the city expected that our scope would be to replace the current 50-meter pool with an identically sized one. But the survey process, already strong in terms of sheer numbers, showed overwhelming support for a recreational “fun water” pool (with 92 percent in favor!), a deep need for competitive programming and, given the park’s adjacency to Washington Elementary, school programming. This informed a decision to develop a two-pool design—a “fun water” pool with a smaller 25m x 25yd competition pool—instead of a single 50m pool. Given the budget constraints of the project, this two-pool scheme required a phased approach, meaning that one pool would be built first, and then the other.
Then came a remarkable turn of events. We watched in awe as the community consistently offered extensive feedback during our workshops and in online surveys, making their wishes clear: two pools, designed and built at the same time. Before long, the city council, with support from the dedicated staff at the Public Works and Parks and Recreation departments, was able to find additional funding and increase the project budget. And suddenly we were creating the fun water and the competition pools at the same time, no phasing needed.
To be clear, this is just one way to reach a wider demographic, and not the only way. But as this effort shows, the more of a community you integrate into a project, the more power you give to the community’s collective voice—and the more extensively you can tailor the project’s design.
We have other projects that could benefit from this level of support, and we’re eager to see how many other schools and school districts we can work with in this way. It’s a win for everyone!
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