The KickStart Files

We recently completed installation of a great new fitness center at Sierra Vista Middle School in La Puente, CA, near Los Angeles. I decided to blog about this particular school for a couple of reasons. First, it’s a great example of the process involved in planning and opening a fitness center within the context of a real world public school environment. Second (but maybe more important), is the story behind the room.

We’ve given SVMS the “Facility Spotlight” over at the KickStart site so you can check out a larger photo gallery there as soon as we get it posted, but I thought I’d put some more practical detail here for anyone interested in developing a fitness room at a school site.

Back Story:

Sierra Vista Middle School opened in 1963. Bob Hartman was the first PE teacher at the school, hired the year it opened. 26 years later, current SVMS PE teacher Tom Watts arrived as a long-term substitute in the Special Ed program. Tom had grown up in the area and gone to the school in the same district where he now found himself teaching.

The two men were at completely opposite ends of their careers; Bob was headed into his last few years, and Tom was a green rookie trying to get through his remaining student teaching hours. Bob took the younger man under his wing and helped him make a smooth transition from student to teacher. Bob knew that Tom needed more teaching hours in PE in order to gain his credential and remain at SVMS, so during that first year, he actually gave up two of his own PE classes and took on two of Tom’s Special Ed periods in order to make sure that Tom got his hours.

Tom taught with Bob until he retired in the early 90s, and the two of them often discussed one of Bob’s dreams; creating an indoor gym/fitness facility at the school. Of course, Bob was years ahead of his time; youth fitness facilities during that era were still largely limited to high school weight rooms.

After Bob retired, the two kept in touch throughout the 90s, until Bob relocated to be nearer his daughters. Two years ago, Tom received a Christmas card from Bob’s wife notifying him that Bob had passed away.

Flash forward to this December, when Tom’s principal called him into her office and let him know that the school had received it’s share of the California state block grant for Physical Education, Recreation and Dance, and that she was prepared to spend it on an indoor fitness and activity space for the school. Needless to say, Tom was thrilled to be given financial and administrative support for such a project, and his thoughts quickly turned to his old friend and colleague, who had missed the fruition of his long-held dream by only a few years.

This April, Sierra Vista Middle School inaugurated the Bob Hartman Fitness Center at a gala grand opening attended by students, parents, staff, district and local officials, and, most memorably, by Bob’s eldest daughter Carrie, who traveled all the way from Carolina to represent her father at the ceremony.

Kudos to Tom and his teaching partner Melissa Avalos (another area native who has returned to teach in the area where she grew up) for their diligence and pro-active efforts in getting the Bob Hartman Fitness Center put together, as well as to principal Sue Kaiser for her vision and support of this long-term investment in the health of the students at SVMS. I think Tom also deserves a lot of credit for remembering and paying tribute to the man who came before him.

Nuts and Bolts: Here’s some practical info regarding fitness center setup with real-world examples from the SVMS project.

Equipment Profile:

Design Philosophy:

Like many schools, SVMS is in an area where the statistics regarding youth fitness are troubling; high rates of childhood obesity and overweight, nutrition issues, etc. Tom Watts wanted:

• An indoor, all-weather facility
• Equipment that could integrate into his existing program and provide new fitness programming options
• A fun, accessible, and inviting space that would encourage ALL students to participate in and enjoy physical activity

While the facility is certainly equipped to provide training for athletes and sports-specific conditioning, these are ancillary to the main mission of encouraging healthy lifestyle choices at SVMS.

To this end, the room features traditional fitness equipment such as weight machines and stationary bikes that allow for variable resistance according to the condition of the user, as well as interactive DDR stations and fun accessories like full-size punching bags. The equipment profile provides a non-competitive fitness experience for all users while featuring enough attention-grabbing fun and variety to keep the class interested through a whole circuit rotation.

One other thing to note: Tom has mentioned that the kids love the way the new fitness center “feels like a high school gym”. We hear this a lot from middle school and junior high teachers, which is one of the reasons we encourage them to install equipment that accommodates the middle school body while maintaining a “real gym” look. Both the TUffStuff selectorized weight machines and the CatEye stationary bikes at SVVMS are good examples (the TuffStuff is made for kids, while the CatEye bike has a small enough form-factor to accommodate Middle School kids)

Typical Programming:

Generally, classes in the SVMS fitness center are run circuit-style. Rotations are timed to allow each student to visit each station with appropriate warm up/cooldown time at the front and end.

Room Planning: We did about three collaborative iterations of the SVMS floor plan as the staff tweaked their equipment profile. Room planning is critical because space limitations are a universal theme for school sites. “Planning” is not just imagining in your head, either; it’s important to do a physical floor plan using the actual dimensions of the room and the equipment. You’d be surprised how much equipment you can get into a room, but conversely, you’d be surprised how quickly the space can fill up. As a general rule, we find that clients underestimate the amount of equipment they can fit into a room, but they overestimate the amount of open space they’ll have left over for other activities such as group stretching, accessory stations, etc.

Another important reason to engage in room planning - you need to optimize the space to allow for classroom management and teaching. We generally try to arrange equipment into functional clusters that make for easy group circuit rotations, with a “teacher path” that allows the supervisor to circumvent the entire room during use. It may also be a good idea to arrange large items (such as weight machines) towards the outside of the space, as they can impede the line of sight. At SVMS the layout is relatively wide-open and accommodates a more traditional row-by-row arrangement of the weight machines.

So, get out the measuring tape, and a ruler, paper, and pencil (or your favorite graphic design software), and start planning. Or call us and we’ll do it for you!

Here’s a look at the SVMS floor plans (click for a larger view).

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