Detroit Public Schools Community District is rewriting the future of education for its students. Through a visionary partnership with DLR Group, the district crafted a 20-year facility master plan and educational specifications that fuse research, innovation, and inquiry-based learning principles. It is more than upgrading and replacing aging facilities. It is about creating dynamic environments that empower students, engage communities, and redefine what learning looks like for the future of Detroit. DPSCD is proving that when vision meets strategy, significant transformation follows.
Asking the Right Questions
DPSCD is the largest public education school system in the state of Michigan with 53,406 students currently enrolled. It operates 106 schools, supporting PreK-12 students across the Detroit metropolitan area. The district champions the whole-child approach, combining superior academics with socio-emotional, extracurricular, and health services tailored to each child’s needs.
DPSCD understands the importance of responsibly and strategically maintaining its facilities. These buildings are educational spaces first, but they are also gathering spaces and workplaces for members of their communities.
A 2018 comprehensive facilities assessment conducted by a third-party identified $1.5 billion in facilities needs over the subsequent five years, and a total of $2.1 billion with actual costs fully accounted for. There were many facilities-related action items the district took initially to alleviate the immediate needs for learning, safety, and security of their students and community members, but the big picture remained – DPSCD required a bold and strategic path to move forward.
School and community leaders took this opportunity to look beyond facilities and dreamed what would it look like if we paired strategic facilities improvements with reimagined educational modalities and pedagogy to provide future-ready learning opportunities to our students and community?
“Although education is one of the common experiences of our community members, curriculum standards and learning conventions have evolved,” Machion Jackson, DPSCD Deputy Superintendent, Operations. “DPSCD sought a student-centric master plan process that focused on the future of teacher and learning as well as the adaptive spaces to support programming.”
Planning and Educational Specifications
In 2018, DLR Group partnered with DPSCD to create a facility master plan, setting a clear vision for the future of education. The plan draws on facility assessments, GIS mapping, enrollment trends, historical data, and direct community input. It equips the district with actionable insights to guide decisions that serve students and families for the next 20 years. The process produced four key outcomes:
- Provide a 20-year Facilities Vision and Plan: There is a $2.1 billion total need with $700 million of one-time funding available initially. This plan identifies recommendations for full $2.1 billion in long-term investments and immediate work for $700 million.
- Protect Neighborhood Schools and Feeder Patterns: It prioritizes placing students in the best building using the facilities assessment, enrollment data, local demographic studies, and school building utilization numbers.
- Continue to Right Size the District: It strategically looks at the number of students in each building versus the number of available seats, considering new buildings, renovations, and consolidation.
- Invest in Early Education: It lays the groundwork for future-ready, equitable feeder patterns into the rest of the DCPSD K-12 schools.
“In Detroit, our students, families, and educators have made it clear that they want learning environments that reflect their brilliance, their potential, and their communities,” says Chatoris Jones, DPSCD Executive Director of Operations. “Integrating our facility master plan with inquiry-based learning models ensures that our investments are not only strategic but deeply human. We’re designing spaces that empower students’ voices, foster exploration, and strengthen the neighborhoods we serve. This work is more than construction – it’s community building.”
Specifically tailored educational specifications were a driver and were strategically used to inform the facility master plan. These educational specifications are the product of DPSCD thinking strategically with DLR Group’s educational designers on how students’ learning behaviors could inform the built environment. The conversations were based around inquiry-based learning models and how student wonderment and curiosity drive learning.
DPSCD uses the educational specifications as a guide to facility design, providing a path for designers to collaborate with staff and school communities to define elements of the built environment that will best serve teaching and learning.
By integrating the facility master plan with educational specifications, DPSCD has a comprehensive plan, pairing educational environments with curriculum delivery. It allows the spatial and facilities recommendations to be directly informed by what optimizes teaching and learning outcomes, specifically for DPSCD students and educators. It delivers on the district’s mission to educate and empower every student, in every community, every day, to build a stronger Detroit and ensures equitable facilities related to new construction, additions, and renovations.
BOLD and Linking Space to Learning
DLR Group delivered these integrated plans by combining our award-winning planning team and the expertise and vision of BOLD™ services to bridge the organization, learning, and design.
BOLD is a change management model that helps educational leaders turn bold visions into real-world learning, where strategy, environment, and innovation come together to support every student. These services support DPSCD in bringing its vision to life, aligning systems, guiding professional learning, and turning educational specifications into catalysts for meaningful, lasting change. Schools often invest in beautiful new spaces hoping to transform teaching and learning, but without the right support, the vision does not fully take hold. Old mindsets persist, and new environments fall short of their potential. In facing this common challenge, we created a solution: BOLD.
“The way students learn has shifted dramatically,” says DLR Group Principal and Educational Learning Designer Marilyn Denison, Ed.D. “To truly prepare them for the future, we must embrace inquiry as the engine of learning and design spaces that adapt to the rhythms of questioning, discovering, and making meaning. Detroit’s new educational specifications reflect this shift by creating environments that empower inquiry, honor how today’s learners learn, and prepare students for their future — not our past.”
BOLD supports visionary thinking to reimagine what’s possible, guide change through shifting school environments, and introduce new teaching and learning models. The team of educational designers ensures the learning environment is the impetus for innovation and student success.
DPSCD’s partnership with DLR Group is shaping the future of education in Detroit. By aligning a 20-year facility master plan with innovative educational specifications and community-driven vision, the district is creating learning environments that empower students and strengthen neighborhoods. This strategic approach proves that when design and pedagogy unite, transformation is not just possible; it is inevitable.