Facility Masters — Training for Educational Facility Professionals

ENERGY STAR: The ENERGY STAR program is a free, voluntary program. The only cost associated with the program is the cost of hiring a Licensed Professional to verify and stamp the completed application, if your organization doesn’t have a Licensed Professional on staff that can perform the review as part of his or her job.

DAVE CONE, EVERGREEN: For Evergreen it was $400/school. However, the entire cost was underwritten by our local electric utility.

When allowing community groups to use your educational organization’s facilities for events and activities, it is essential that you require those third party groups to have the proper insurance.  You must protect your school from liability issues and manage the risks related to community use of your facilities, such as personal injury and participant health/safety, as well as potential damage to facilities and mechanical failures.

Our peers on the Facility Events Listserv shared their policies regarding insurance requirements and coverage limits, including this best practice from Rina Prasad at West Contra Costa USD in California: Read more…

1. When repairing an adhered rubber roof, how dependable is re-seaming a 15 – 20 year old EPDM roof with current adhesives – in other words, is this a good investment to prolong roof life?

Seam Repair itself should be fine to accomplish and be dependable. To go ahead with it depends on the overall condition of the roof system along with how many seams need to be re-seamed. To re-seam a majority of  seams may not be a good economic decision if other aspects of the roof system also need work; the flashings are not good, or there is a lot of wet insulation. 15 – 20 years of service life from a ballasted EPDM (rubber) roof is pretty successful, in our opinion. Isolated seam repairs would likely make the most sense.

Hosted by Roger Young, featuring Melody Temple (Chesterfield County Public Schools, VA) and John Kangas (Eanes ISD, TX). Learn how to establish a program for recovering your school’s costs for after-hours facility use while still effectively meeting the needs of the community.

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Surfacing under playground equipment is a problem because 79% of all injuries are due to a lack of appropriate surfacing or children falling off onto the ground. We cannot eliminate all injuries, but we need to be  trying to reduce serious head injuries. We’re still going to have some long bone fractures, we’re going to have some dislocations. And if you think about being at the top of a high slide and falling off, we want to be sure that there is surfacing of a sufficient depth to prevent head injuries.

How do you know if the playground equipment is approprite for the age grouping in the school?

This is where you want to hire a professional designer, a landscape architect, or work with your playground manufacturers and suppliers who have the expertise and knowledge to make recommendations about the age appropriate. The manufacturer and supplier is to tell you who this equipment is designed for, who’s the intended. That’s the first place to start. There may also be some local ordinances or codes or child and daycare requirements that various states or communities may have that you would want to check into.

                              There is a standard that ASTM puts out for play equipment for children under the age of 2. So there is another resource so that you know the size and shape and use zones that are required.

Hosted by Roger Young, featuring Taylor Iascone (Berklee College of Music, MA) and John Garcia (ALPHA Facilities Solutions)

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Generally speaking, there are two types of surfacing that are used in play areas. Loose filled materials everything from wood chips, bark mulch, sand, pea stone engineered with fiber shredded rubber, or the unitary cord in place, mats and rubber. Do not use concrete, asphalt, grass, or earth as a surface cover. There are still many public playgrounds that don’t have proper surfacing.

Inspections, you can’s inspect a playground enough. Some of the things that drives inspections are the age of the kids, the frequency of use, where it’s located, what are the conditions, if you’re in cold temperatures plastics are going to get brittle. If you’re in hot temperatures both plastic and metal parts on the playground equipment are going to be hot.

Athletic fields serve an important purpose at every educational organization, giving students a place to participate in competitive, intramural and recreational activities, as well as providing a way for the community to engage with your organization.  There are definitely pros and cons of both artificial turf and natural grass playing fields, and one may be better than the other for different fields at your institution depending on many factors including: weather/climate, primary purpose (sports vs. community use), and capital budget for initial installation and ongoing maintenance.

Our peers on the Facility Masters Listserv shared their insight, personal experiences and best practices in a recent discussion.

“Artificial turf fields do allow for a lot of use but are far from maintenance free.  We have found that they are only practical when you are prepared to charge significant fees to cover their cost and use them for competitive athletic events only.  Players need to use the correct cleats since the wrong ones tear up base lines and seams.”

“Maintenance includes regular inspections, sweeping, flushing, refilling the infill mix, repairing tears, seam splits and worn spots.  We trained in-house staff to do repairs since hiring out is expensive.  You have to ‘irrigate’ them to flush the drainage system and keep them clean. The carpet lasts 6-10 years depending on use, so you have to plan to replace it regularly and figure out a funding stream.”

Kathy Johnson – Seattle Public Schools, WA

“We have both real and artificial in many areas (athletics and playgrounds).  If you go artificial, it better be very high quality, such as FieldTurf (most NFL and baseball fields are done with that company) – expensive but worth it.  If you go cheap or less expensive… you get what you pay for!

“We are currently installing 2 new artificial turf football fields (redo’s) and building a new $48 million stadium with artificial turf football and baseball and softball fields. Cost to install them is about $700K+ per field (football), then replacement cost (fabric only) is about $350K every 10 years. Lots of capital expense, so it must be scheduled in the master plan for every 10 years.  The field must last at least 10 years, and you must replace it by 12 years (with heavy use year round). Also they MUST pass the new safety codes and drop test for cushion and bounce.”

“Real grass fields are tough here in the southwest because we get little rain and must water every other day.  Fields are used heavily and wear out, so we have to take them off line often to let them rest and grow.”

John Dufay – Albuquerque Public Schools, NM

“After extensive research, my opinion is that unless you need to play many sports in every season, natural turf is still best.  If you were to do a financial analysis, I believe you would find you could re-sod a field every year for less money than the annual amortized cost of artificial turf.  My biggest concern is what happens if, when the time comes to replace it, you do not have the funds to do so?  You can always play on dirt in a budget crunch, but you can’t play on artificial turf that is worn beyond use. ”

David Kimel – Bellows Free Academy, VT