Walker Elementary School + Buford Middle School

Charlottesville City Schools
Walker Elementary School + Buford Middle School Reconfiguration

As part of the city’s ongoing quest for greater equity, the Charlottesville City Schools Reconfiguration will improve student experience across the district, create 21^st century learning environments, and improve access to wrap around services for the city’s most vulnerable families.

Client: Charlottesville City Schools

Location: Charlottesville, VA

Scope: Elementary + Middle Schools

In 1966, as overt ‘Massive Resistance’ to school desegregation had all but faded across the Commonwealth of Virginia, the City of Charlottesville opened Buford Junior High and Walker Junior High – two roughly identical school buildings that were erected to serve separate halves of one city’s seventh-, eighth and ninth-grade students. The dual junior high school model created a de facto system of racial segregation between Charlottesville’s north and south sides - whereby Walker was a predominantly white student population and Buford a predominantly Black student population. In 1996, the school division concluded that the best way to deliver parity was to reconfigure the district - with all the City’s fifth and sixth graders attending Walker and all its seventh and eighth graders attending Buford.

Aging buildings, combined with the brief student tenures (21 months each) at these two campuses, has resulted in learning environments that work against educators, not with them, fueling even greater inequities as those who can place their children in surrounding private schools at the start of fifth grade. Once again, the City of Charlottesville is reconfiguring their allocation of grades in the elementary and middle schools, and renovating and expanding the two campuses, in order to further academic and equity goals.

VMDO led the planning, public outreach, and design for three concepts each campus; helped the public select a single scheme for each; shepherded the selected scheme through the public approvals process; and is in the process of developing full schematic design documents for both campuses for approval in March 2022. Under the proposed reconfiguration, Buford will house sixth through eighth grade, and Walker will serve as a centralized preschool. Pending City Council approval, VMDO will next proceed with design development phase of the recommended schemes with the goal of completing construction bid documents by late 2022. This project represents the largest potential capital investment for the City of Charlottesville in many years and the greatest opportunity to positively transform the school division and its students in generations.