North Monterey County Unified School District
Facilities Master Plan
NMCUSD’s Facilities Master Plan (the Master Plan) describes a roadmap for a series of building and renovation investments that will enable the district to support its educational mission across its campuses for the next five to ten years. This Master Plan is informed by a data-driven assessment of the district’s current buildings and grounds which evaluates needs at each campus according to its ability to accommodate NMCUSD’s educational programs, its projected enrollment, and its goals for community, identity, and school climate. Where gaps are found, the plan lays out a series of physical recommendations for improvement.
Six Guiding Principles were established at the project outset in collaboration with the Steering Committee, and validated in engagement with community stakeholders. These principles serve as a framework for decision making over the course of the planning process. They were employed in evaluating strategies for inclusion in the Master Plan, and will continue to be used as the district prioritizes projects for implementation.
Engaging the students, teachers, families and staff of the District is an essential part of our planning process. We structured our engagements with a few key principles in mind:
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engagements must promote trust and transparency
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identifying and discussing areas of mis-alignment between groups is important to long-term success
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collective wisdom exists within all participant groups
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to make as many voices heard as possible, multiple engagement channels must be employed
Over the past three years, the master planning team employed numerous strategies to solicit input, feedback and co-create with a broad group of stakeholders across the District.
Any successful strategy is founded on good information. To that end, MKThink spent months gathering and assessing qualitative and quantitative data points. Considered in isolation from one another, quantitative and qualitative data may fall short. But evaluated in conjunction, they offer insights that might otherwise stay hidden. When assessing the data, we evaluated where qualitative and quantitative findings aligned, but also evaluated misalignment.
The Master Plan strategies provide an actionable framework for improving the quality, quantity, operations, and flow of facilities on campus and fulfilling the vision outlined in the Guiding Principles. Strategies are not designs, nor are they specific plans for individual school sites; they are high-level, data-driven approaches to addressing NMCUSD’s facility needs throughout the district.
As much as it might like to, the district simply cannot accomplish all that it wants to right away. Some initiatives, like ‘curb appeal’ projects, are designed as ‘quick wins’ that can improve the image and identity of each school site in the more immediate term with available funds and grant programs. Other strategies, like realigning campus enrollment, depend on new construction and are therefore more capital intensive and on a longer-term pathway.
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The Implementation Roadmap takes these interdependencies into account and outlines a high-level, transparent framework for the district to prioritize facility improvement programs over the next five to ten years.