New elementary school brings hope to neglected South Sac neighborhood | Opinion

I have been watching the team here in our Sacramento office of HMC Architects bring the new Nicholas Elementary School campus to life, from the time the project was awarded, through community presentations, countless client meetings, site walks, Microsoft Teams calls, design iterations and coordination with the school district, construction manager, contractor and tradespeople.

On a sky-blue August morning, it all came together. At the ribbon-cutting ceremony, there were taco trucks, giveaways and a big balloon arch. Community groups set up tables to share brochures. A throng of people gathered, there were warm greetings and hugs, families, kids, babies in strollers and TV crews doing interviews. The energy was high, and there was a feeling in the air that this was an important day.

District leaders gave speeches of gratitude from the podium, and there was a wide red ribbon stretched out by many hands. Finally, the ribbon was cut.

At Nicholas Elementary, there’s a story underneath the story: The school, situated in the Lemon Hill area of South Sacramento, is a neighborhood of people from many ethnic backgrounds, including Mexican, Central American, Vietnamese, Hmong, Chinese, Filipino, Cambodian/Khmer, Lao, Indian, Pakistani, African American, Hawaiian, Samoan, Tongan and American Indian.

Many parents in this neighborhood struggle on a daily basis to secure basic necessities for their families. Like all parents, these parents want the best for their kids. On the day of Nicholas Elementary’s ribbon-cutting, while milling around in the crowd, I kept thinking about the profound sense of parental love and hope at this event.

This neighborhood has waited a very long time for this school. It replaces an aging campus that was built more than 50 years ago — in the era of black and white photos, the nation’s first rocket launches and President John F. Kennedy. Education has evolved a long way from those days, when teachers lectured to neat rows of kids.

That old campus, with failing casement windows, peeling paint and basic floor plans, could not keep up with the new modes of learning, the collaborative work groups, hands-on projects and flexible, dynamic, technology-infused teaching methods. This new campus is going to be an important home base for Nicholas Elementary School students — and for this community.

This project required putting 55,000 square feet of built space on 10 acres, with classroom buildings arranged in learning villages. It required expertise across a wide range of specialties, from the core engineering disciplines, through traffic, food service, security, technology, energy and educational planning.

At least eight people in our office at HMC Architects worked on Nicholas Elementary, spending thousands of hours on the project over three-plus years. We are all lucky to be doing this important work — designing schools that profoundly affect so many lives.

The Sacramento City Unified School District is one of the largest in the state, with some 80 school sites in its purview, managing a complex and increasingly difficult mission of educating all students across a densely populated and highly diverse metropolitan area, regardless of individual ability, need or status.

The district has made a formal commitment in their planning process to spend their massive $700 million bond dollars more equitably across the district, giving love to areas that have been overlooked for years. Nicholas is one of three elementary school campus replacements being delivered this year as part of this district initiative, based on a rigorous analysis of data and geographic information, called an “Equity-Based Framework for Facilities Investments.”

At one of the community meetings as part of this district initiative, one of our staff members recounted talking with several parents who expressed surprise that their school was being replaced — they never expected it because they had been overlooked for so long.

The idea of “equity” is at the core of the mission of public education in America: to take all comers, a field-leveling aspect of our society that has propelled generations upward and onward to good middle-class lives.

The bottom line is that we cannot talk about the Nicholas Elementary School project without talking about inequality — Sacramento’s tale of two cities. This weighed on my mind during this project, especially as I tried to check my own privilege — dropping in like some kind of mercenary to this school, driving on the freeway in my button-down, zooming from my nice neighborhood just a few exits away.

We cannot solve wealth inequality or financial insecurity overnight, but we can demonstrate that building a new school can give hope to a neighborhood we have neglected for too long. The next chapter of South Sacramento began on the first day of school, Aug. 18.

Justin Panson is a senior marketing manager at HMC Architects.