Acoustics 101

In the beginning, it was a high school without walls around many of its classrooms. And walls keep out sound.

“I still remember my English chair [complaining] about trying to teach Macbeth, while 30 feet away were 37 carpentry students framing up a wall,” says Ed Kovochich, recently retired principal of Milwaukee’s Lynde and Harry Bradley School of Technology and Trade.

The building was an architectural gem, built with funding from the late Jane Pettit and other donors. But its open plan left noisy plumbing, electrical or welding classes engulfing academics. During teacher conferences in the student commons area, Kovochich recalls, “the noise was so bad you couldn’t hear somebody sitting directly across the table from you.”

Since the school’s opening in 2002, business leaders involved in its creation have helped oversee acoustical renovations. Companies such as Harley Davidson and Pieper Power provided nearly $250,000 in labor and materials to seal off academic areas, says Kovochich.

But how could a $50 million, state-of-the-art facility have missed the boat so loudly? Jim Shields, an architect from Hammel, Green and Abrahamson, which headed the design, blames “intentional overcrowding of the school, along with a significant curriculum change from how the building was designed.”

Though its capacity was expressly listed at 1,444 students, enrollment has ranged from 1,550 to 1,575 in the past three years. But administrators question the sonic impact of those extra kids.

“Those kids are a drop in the bucket,” says Kovochich.

MPS Superintendent William Andrekopoulos agrees. “If you’re sitting in an English class with 35 kids and no walls, and there’s noise from kids in the hall, I don’t see how that’s related to building capacity.” Plus, with attendance averaging 82 percent, the building’s usually below the 1,444 limit, he adds.

Shields believes money is behind the overenrollment. “They get paid by the head,” he says. Each student brings in $6,478 in state funding. “What are you going to do with those extra kids? They’ve scavenged for classrooms in places that weren’t intended for that purpose.”

A bigger problem noted by Shields: The building was designed to fit a curriculum based on the book Breaking Ranks. “Instead of a conventional classroom arrangement, kids would work on projects in open spaces, maybe five on a project, and the teacher would come and advise,” explains Shields. “However, they never even attempted the curriculum. From the first day, Ed [Kovochich] realized they were woefully short on space and opened up classrooms in student work areas.”

Whatever its acoustical challenges, students are succeeding, notes Jack MacDonough, chairman of the Bradley Tech Commission that developed the school. In the year prior to the move into the new building, Tech had a 77 percent graduation rate, a 78 percent attendance rate and a 1.87 grade point average. By 2004-05, that had improved to an 80 percent graduation rate, an 82 percent attendance and a 2.01 GPA. Unless the new facility attracted a better class of incoming students, the noise hasn’t hurt performance.

“Realistically they’ve done everything you can do,” says Bridget Schock, a math teacher at Tech. “The building will never be perfect. I guess what happens is we adapt.”