An imaginative joint effort by public and private interests revived the former Ridgefield High School (Connecticut) and transformed it into an executive office building. It will eventually revert to the town for another use. (Author/MLF)

Details on how a surplus school was transformed into an office for the Marin County (California) Office of Education. (Author/MLF)

An Atlanta, Georgia, school that closed after 50 years of service and stood vacant for five more years now contains subsidized rental apartments for the elderly. (MLF)

The Samuel F. B. Morse School, built in 1874 and closed in 1980, is a historic landmark in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. Now the building serves as low-income housing for 70 elderly tenants and is praised as being an imaginative and creative use of an old school structure. (MLF)

Describes a community planning laboratory process held to resolve the issue of reuse of excess school facilities. (Author/MLF)

The Surplus Schools Project was designed to stimulate and encourage the adaptive use and preservation of vacant school buildings in New York State. Through a statewide competition, the Preservation League selected four surplus schools that were located in four distinctly different communities and presented a broad range of problems and…

Rental of surplus school district property, arranged by a property management company, reduced the deficit of the properties for the Madison Metropolitan School District, Wisconsin. (MLF)

The Denver (Colorado) Board of Education has taken a number of steps to avoid closing schools. Among these are refiguring school capacities; providing full-time space for programs that do not always function full-time; providing additional private space for related services (psychological, social work, and nursing); expanding instructional…

With community cooperation, imagination, and marketing skills, school buildings can be converted to other community uses. Tables summarize recent sales in Delaware. (MLF)

Two dozen schools in Cincinnati, Ohio, were closed over a period of 3 years. Property sales yielded over $1 million; one property, considered an architectural gem, is now a health facility with office spaces and four others are leased. The leases can be cancelled if the district needs school space. (MLF)

Beginning on the front cover, this article recommends planning ahead and involving the community in surplus school use decisions. It suggests turning surplus schools into projects restoring historic buildings and benefitting neighborhoods. (JM)

A Michigan law allows school districts to make energy conservation improvements and pay for them with savings generated by lowered energy consumption. A 71-year-old school, now the Community Education Center of Kalamazoo, Michigan, also serves as the base for a centralized energy management system for the school district. (MLF)

At the same time that schools are closing in many communities because of declining enrollments, the arts are expanding at the community level. The problem of surplus school space can be the solution to the needs of many artists and arts groups. Mutual to the arts groups and the communities are the benefits of flexible arrangements and the presence…

In many communities new arrangements of surplus school space have been made that facilitate use of the space by the people of the districts, encourage government agencies to anticipate and support social transitions where they are necessary, and allow school districts to improve the quality of their programs. This paper is a survey of some of…