Jeffrey Vincent, deputy director of University of California Berkeley's Center for Cities & Schools, visited Palo Alto Thursday to discuss the possibilities of treating schools as more than just schools to help communities.

"One sixth of the people in the state go to and from a school every day," Vincent said. "The point of my talk was wisely using schools to meet both educational and community needs."

As public entities, he said, schools could have three functions in communities—as educational, physical and social infrastructure.

But in order to make use of schools in that way, local governments face very real challenges, he said, because of local jurisdictional silos, no collaboration policies at the state level and difficult funding realities.

In order to wisely build and use the facilities, different entities need to cooperate, Vincent said.

Joint use is just one of the innovation ideas. It's about "non-school people using school space," Vincent said. The idea can be practiced in different ways: strategic co-location supported by the city and school districts, joint development and (re)development that involves two or more entities coming together to jointly fund plans of a school and have ongoing joint use.

In addition, partnerships can be forged to modernize and expand school facilities, he said. And when building or renovating schools, planners may also consider multi-story buildings instead of single-story buildings.

Repurposing buildings is another idea. Vincent gave an example of buying an old mall, using it as school as well as a conference center, and also renting out parts of the building to private companies.  

When speaking of public and private joint development, Vincent used Oyster School in Washington, D.C., as an example. When the school saw a decline of enrollment, it negotiated with a private developer. As part of the agreement, the school gave some land to the private developer to build high-rise housing and, in return, the school got its facilities renovated almost for free.

Vincent said that when teaming up with others, partners need to assess school facilities and community needs, conduct a full cost analysis of options, use a community process—and also use the same numbers.

"What we found is that when localities aren't working together, they're actually using different kinds of housing projections and different enrollment projections," Vincent said.

About 15 people showed up at Thursday's lecture. While they welcomed the innovation opportunities, most of them found it hard to solve the difficulties here in Palo Alto.

"This is a great idea for school districts that are on decline and need [revenues], but in some sense I don't see how this really fits Palo Alto," said Arthur Keller, the city's planning and transportation commissioner. "One of the interesting things for this is if you took the people in Palo Alto and you took the people in the school district, I think that the most agreement for the overall majority is that neither one wants to grow."

Keller said the schools in Palo Alto were already full of students. But for additional students, schools cannot get enough financial recourses to support them.

The city of Palo Alto is updating a comprehensive plan that will go from 2010 to 2020. Part of the plan is to zone areas for building a number of houses. The plan will impact the school district because a large number of people moving to Palo Alto are families with kids who will attend Palo Alto's schools.

"We're going through the exercise now, figuring out how to build that list of housing sites, the inventory for the Housing Element," said Susan Fineberg, the city's planning commissioner. "We know that in Palo Alto we zone for housing, [then] it gets built. And it's full of kids. Our schools [exceed] capacity, are underfunded. [They] don't get the full funding to cover the new students."

Penny Ellson, a PTA "safe routes to school" advocate, is worried about the transportation issue once the houses are built.

"If they are going to mandate how much housing we have to build, then they need to be thinking about what the impacts on schools are going to be, and they need to be thinking about impacts on transit and they need to be providing some real support to cities, because cities can't meditate these stuff on their own," she said.