Old Motels

Kids don’t have to attend school to learn. Today, the world is their classroom, and they should be given credit for their learning wherever and whenever that learning happens.

When we ran a personalized learning lab school in Houston, one of the big takeaways was that the city offered a multitude of locations for learning to occur. Coffeehouses, libraries, museums, conference rooms, parks, community centers were all places utilized by our learning coaches as base spaces where our young learners could define, plan, execute, and evaluation their own and each other’s learning.

Being open-minded and creative is not a strength of our K-12 system at large. We need to start thinking differently about how space can be used for learning – anytime, anywhere. That’s why I read with interest an article from the High Country News about how Albuquerque, New Mexico’s developers are turning old motels into affordable housing:

“As a housing crisis pummels the West, from Sun Valley, Idaho, to Tucson, Arizona, there’s a dull irony in the number of abandoned houses and old hotels. Some of them cluster around former mining boomtowns; Bannack, Montana, for instance, was briefly the state’s capital before the veins of gold ran dry and the 10,000 residents moved on. Today, some 60 buildings still stand, including the handsome red-brick Hotel Meade. Two Guns, Arizona, once served Dust Bowl migrants and other travelers along Route 66, but when the interstate highway passed it by, the town collapsed. Today, its ruins include homes and motels as well as campgrounds for travelers and the remnants of a zoo that once housed mountain lions and Gila monsters.”

“These ‘ghost houses’ aren’t just found in old mining camps in the desert or mountains, they’re also in busy Western cities. Even places with housing shortages can be home to thousands of vacant buildings. The city of Denver knocks down dozens of derelict homes every year. Other place, like Albuquerque, New Mexico, have taken a different approach: They’re trying to rehabilitate the abandoned houses and turn them into new housing. Like many mid-size cities, Albuquerque has a shortage of affordable places to live. Housing costs have risen almost 50% since 2019, and the city needs as many as 30,000 new units to keep up with the demand. Meanwhile, plywood covers the windows of unused buildings, many of them one-story faux-adobe Pueblo Revival structures. In 2018, a municipal task force estimated that 1,200 to 1,300 homes were either vacant, abandoned or generally substandard.”

“The city is also home to a collection of crumbling hotels. Some of these are former motels, which, like the city of Two Guns, went out of business when Route 66 was officially removed from the highway system in 1985. Others fell into a state of decay as the city’s economy and reputation changed.”

“But Albuquerque has recently ramped up an effort to rescue these old houses and hotels and turn them into new and more affordable homes. Last year, the city created a program that offered developers $4 million to turn hotels and other existing buildings into apartments. It’s not a new idea: In the 2010s, for example, developers reclaimed a string of old Route 66 motels, using federal tax incentives to turn them into new housing.”

…

Why can’t our K-12 public school system approach creative solutions to their problems the way certain housing markets, like Albuquerque, New Mexico, are solving theirs?

This idea that learning can occur in just one place – the school – or it isn’t really learning is just nonsense. We need to approach learning as an anytime, anywhere activity, and design a system that rewards learning that occurs anytime, anywhere.

We need to create a new learning system that models itself after a creative housing enterprise – a system that puts young learners first, and helps them define, plan, execute, and evaluate their own learning, including reading, writing, problem-solving, and character development success.

Til tomorrow. SVB