Transcript- The K-12 Market Outlook: Technology, Procurement, and COVID’s Impact with Jere Smith, Director of Capital Improvements for Atlanta Public Schools
Voice Over:
Welcome to AEC Marketing for Principals brought to you by Smartegies, where we help design and construction firms navigate sales and leverage marketing to win more projects. Here are your hosts, Katie Cash and Judy Sparks.
Katie Cash:
Hey everyone. Welcome to today’s episode of the AEC Marketing for Principals podcast. I’m your host Katie Cash and today I’m excited to bring back by popular demand, Director of Capital Improvements for Atlanta Public Schools, Mr. Jere Smith, and also my partner in strategy, Judy Sparks, head of Smartegies welcome to the show.
Judy Sparks:
Thank you.
Jere Smith:
Thank you for having me.
Katie Cash:
Jere, I think it’s so exciting to have you as our wrap-up for our season two of the podcast, because you are one of our first guest episodes last season when we first launched and you are still one of the fan favorites, so we are thoroughly excited about having you today and just want to pick your brain on what has changed because this has been that year of pivoting, right? It’s that year of liminal space, as Judy’s talked about on the podcast all season long we’re, we’re kind of in the season of transition and trying to adapt to new normals and would love to just kind of get a quick update on what’s going on in the world of Atlanta public schools.
Jere Smith:
Well, despite all that went on through the early spring summer and now into the fall and winter we have kept going as far from the capital improvement standpoint. There’ve been a few scares on projects, a few, you know, positive tasks, a few shutdowns for a day or two here or there. But for the most part projects continued on we obviously kind of changed our format and how we meet and how much we meet and how many we get together in the trailer. But for the most part, I’d have to say things really continued on. We really didn’t miss any dates. You know, had a couple of pushbacks on deliveries of certain commodities but those came through and with no students walking back into the buildings in August, you know, some of the pressures were off.
Judy Sparks:
I was going to say, Jere, I think that one of the silver linings of all of this is one of the biggest challenges with K-12 construction is often working in occupied spaces, especially where there’s, you know, students involved and faculty. And, and I guess one of the silver linings might be that you’ve, you’ve been able to work free of those occupied spaces. And how has that affected, you know, your construction progress or have you been able to do things logistically a little bit easier than you had before?
Jere Smith:
It has, I mean, we have a fairly complex addition renovation project going on at Grady High School in Midtown Atlanta and one of our phases was going to be done over this summer. Well, with the school being, we’ve been able to kind. Of advance that process and go ahead and do the work. So we, instead of finishing at the end of the summer, we will likely finish you know, prior to summer this year
Judy Sparks:
I bet your students and faculty are really excited about getting into these new spaces with certainty and on time or even early, do they have any concerns about, you know, what the world looks like in education now that we’re living through a pandemic? Has it changed any of the way that you’re approaching your programs and the physical footprint of your schools?
Jere Smith:
Well, it hasn’t yet. We’ve talked about a lot of things. We’ve talked about a lot with the other Metro districts, state districts, and even nationally a lot of people have some different ideas, but we’re certainly stepping up our efforts in maintaining HVAC systems and their performance. We’ve upgraded some of our filters, you know, again, making sure the buildings are cleaned and cleaned again. But as far as changing the buildings, changing how they’re designed, we haven’t really made any calls like that, or even installing certain components in classrooms. I mean, like APS has about 4,500 classrooms. So if we made, you know, a $10,000 decision per classroom, you know, it has some pretty substantial impacts and, you know, you got to make a kind of an educated decision on is that expended, do you have the, the money to spend and is that really gonna make a difference? So we haven’t made any major calls like that to make any changes.
Judy Sparks:
Well, I noticed that procurement has been an interesting thing with all public clients since COVID and you know, we’re seeing a lot more in terms of electronic submissions and virtual interviews and those types of things. How has the pandemic, or has it changed the way that you go about buying stuff?
Jere Smith:
Well, you’re right. Pretty much everything is done virtually these days. We’ve had a couple of face-to-face pre-proposal meetings and similar type meetings. APS was kind of in the process of going to a more virtual platform anyway. And it’s just interesting it’s happened through the COVID outbreak.We moved from a more of an email individual request RFP out to a pre-approved list of vendors to, we use a platform now called Bonfire and where I might’ve handled the procurement in the past days, that being an email for me now, everything’s being pushed down on the Bonfire platform through our procurement office. So it’s a little bit different face to vendors out there proposing on APS projects.
Judy Sparks:
So do you have any advice for those vendors? You know, I mean it’s going to come out and say it Jere, that you’ve been the face of Atlanta public schools for as long as I can remember. And the design and construction community just absolutely adores you and loves the relationships that they have with you and have become accustomed to how you run the show over there. And now that the procurement is going through more of a technology-based solution and through your procurement office, I think that some of our, you know, design and construction companies are struggling a little bit trying to understand how to navigate that change. Do you have any advice for them?
Jere Smith:
Yeah. You know, they’re probably struggling in other districts too. I don’t know if it’s specific to APS, but it’s electronic, it’s a technology device. It’s very unforgiving. If it says, put a dot after it, you need to do it, you know, dates and times, or now, you know, hard in spans, you know, is the time when the computer there’s less, there’s much more black and white and a lot less gray. And not that there was a lot before, but there was a little more human side right now. It’s, you’re not there. I would say, you really can’t wait, you need to test your technology, make sure you’re communicating with Bonfire platform or whatever platform, you know, a district may be using. And I don’t know if any of these platforms really have a process for a test or something like that. Just so you know, if you could test your ability to communicate with it, but the real advice is to just kind of read and get your head into that platform and understand how it works and your ability with your technology and network to communicate with it. Because as much as you want to say, it’s all the same and it is not all the same, because it depends on your computer, your laptop, your systems that you’re trying to tie into or connect into Bonfire. They don’t all do it the same. I’m pretty confident.
Katie Cash:
That’s how it always goes with technology, right? It’s, it’s universal yet very different.
Jere Smith:
Exactly.
Judy Sparks:
So, you know, it’s funny, you mentioned it’s very black and white these days, but at the end of the day, there’s still a selection committee and there’s still a review process. Could you walk us through what that looks like now with the relationship with procurement and with facilities and how that is all being orchestrated and, you know, a lot of our, our clients like to get to know their customer ahead of an RFQ or RFP, and now they’re not sure, you know, that they’re there to approach you with that relationship building process or your purchasing department or both. We get these questions a lot from our various general contractors and architects that are really eager to work for APS and another school district is you’re right. It’s not unique to just you, but what advice do you have for those who want to understand what’s coming well in advance of an RFQ?
Jere Smith:
Right? I mean, I don’t have an absolute answer. I mean, it still comes down to people. There is still an evaluation committee of these, but there’s no book in her hand, you can flip back and forth through. That’s an interesting phenomenon. You know, you pull up a PDF on the screen and you have to scroll through it, and I’m not gonna sit here and tell people how to submit a proposal, but I’ve seen proposals that are seven and 800 pages. And I know you’re trying to get all your information in there, but you can just imagine opening a PDF on it on a laptop screen, or even a desktop screen, and trying to scroll through that many pages and find something you could do it maybe with a tab notebook, it’s much more typical in a PDF format. Maybe a little more simple and a little more direct, you know, again, I don’t want to tell somebody to leave something out of the proposal that they think is important, but when you start getting into hundreds of pages it’s tough. It really is. Yeah.
Judy Sparks:
How much are you seeing with the electronic submission, the ability for firms to integrate other mediums, like video or links to other platforms within their PDF? Are you seeing a lot of that happening?
Jere Smith:
Actually not and I’m not, don’t pretend to be the expert on Bonfire and that’s the platform I know, but there really is no provision. I mean, it is you get a PDF and that’s really it. Now I have seen people that there’ll be a link in that PDF to some other file, frankly, I haven’t clicked on any of those. So I don’t know what that will do. I don’t know if it would take you to it like a normal PDF order but no, it’s again, it’s very black and white here. Here’s your platform for submitting your material and submitted here. And I know that can probably be frustrating to a lot of people who are a little more advanced in the videos or the other interactive presentations that they’re so good at.
Katie Cash:
Gotcha. Quick follow up, Jere, since you mentioned it, you know, people are trying to get creative and I think they’re doing it with good intentions of trying to have reader engagement with these PDFs submissions. Like you mentioned, maybe there’s a QR code or there’s links embedded within the PDF, trying to drive you to either watch a video or driving you to an immersive online experience, which you said you’re not clicking those. So do you view those as being unnecessary or it’s just not something that you find yourself using and you wish that design and construction would just stop and just simply answer the question
Jere Smith:
I will say answering the question is you can’t go wrong in answering a question. I know vendors other professionals, they want to go a little bit further. They want to stand out. I mean, I’m trying to a little bit at a loss right now. How do you make yourself do that in this virtual world? It’s just very tough because the items aren’t released to the evaluators to a certain period of time. So you can’t really advance look at them and you only have a certain window of time to review them. So, you know, it’s not like the books you could carry home with you on the weekend and at your leisure kind of thumb through them, put them down, pick them back up. I mean, I guess you kind of can do that in the virtual platform, but it’s just not the same, at least not for me.
Katie Cash:
Well you used to share with us, Jere, that you would allow maybe 10 or 15 minutes to review a proposal cover to cover, and then you would have to move on to the next one, just because your stack was so large. Have you found that now that you’re reviewing things on screen, is it taking you longer to look through things are you about during that same period?
Jere Smith:
A little more clunky, because again, it’s harder to stop and start the phone rings and it may be, it really shouldn’t be. But it just seems to be a little harder to stop and start and engage. So you kind of get into one, you want to finish it, but the time to review them kind of depends on what else is on my plate down the road. But yeah, sometimes it’s, you know, 10, 12, 15 minutes maybe at the most to look at one and then you’re moving on. Now the interviews, I think we’ll probably talk about those in a minute. That’s a little bit different. You have more time there and there is more interaction in that.
Judy Sparks:
Yeah, that’s a great segue too, I was going to ask you, Jere, since this pandemic has settled in and everything’s been changing you’d mentioned you’ve done some virtual interviews and some in-person pre-proposal meetings in person interviews. Can you give us an example? You don’t have to name the firm, but can you give us an example of just some memorable moments in these interviews where an architect or a contractor maybe did something that was really outstanding?
Jere Smith:
Usually somebody will still, whether it was in person or, you know, virtual, they will hit on some particular topic related to the project. And I don’t think APS is totally different, but our projects are very personal. They’re very specific. They’re very neighborhood oriented and the firms that kind of hit on something. And I can’t really cite one right now, but they’ll speak to something specific about a project, like a tree that the kids gather under or the place where all the parents gather in the morning to drop off their kids with the coffee and the dogs, you know, those kinds of very personal, very site-specific kind of things. And at least I can, and I think others can too, on the interviews that kind of hits home and it kinda makes you, and I don’t want to say people aren’t paying attention to the online interviews, but it kind of makes you look up and pay attention just as it did in an in-person interview. You know, it really catches your eye catches your ear. So the firms that do that, and I’ve told this before COVID, and before all the virtual platforms, I told people the same thing, it’s you got to figure out what makes this project special? What makes it personal? What makes it oriented? And I would think you always need to kind of drill down on some of that, I think to really engage the evaluation or the interview committee and the firms that do that seem to do better.
Judy Sparks:
Well I want to pivot just a little bit. You mentioned earlier that you’ve been talking to your peer group and here in Metro Atlanta that worked for other school districts and you all have been just with, 4LE and, you know, not just during the pandemic, but you’ve always sort of worked together and, you know, being education K-12 public education forward and the facilities side forwardWhat are some trends that are happening these days in the design and construction of K-12 that you see continuing?
Jere Smith:
Well, we’re still talking about and still implementing what we call maker spaces or creative work, creative labs or spaces, places that are flexible, where different types of learning can occur or projects can occur, you know, kind of interactive sessions can occur. If we ever go back to that, those are still a big, I won’t say a big topic. There’s still a topic of discussion when we’re doing planning and design and I’ll back up and kind of say for right now, the schools that we’re planning and designing, it hasn’t changed drastically from where it was a year ago. And when I say a year ago, that was, nobody was even talking about coding at that point.
Judy Sparks:
Right. It’s it’s funny when you said, you know, we were already moving to a virtual platform. I’ve heard that so much lately, whether it’s from a K-12 school district or a health care system. And in the reality is that we are in very technology rich society. And I think if anything, this pandemic has, I’ve said this many times, just rear-ended us in the future very quickly. And I think we’re all living in this, like what next what’s happening next era. So even though the instructional spaces haven’t changed that much, do you feel that it’s inevitable that as we adapt to this new, you know, low touch, no touch economy and more districts are looking to distribute education virtually, I would imagine that there it is eventually going to impact the way we think about buildings and how we design them and build them. Do you agree with that?
Jere Smith:
Yeah. I mean, we’ve talked around some of those things, I guess over the last year, things like a computer lab may kind of morph into a video studio or virtual studio or something like that. That’s not so much in the brick and mortar piece. It’s more in the technology and maybe electrical things. You know, I think those things will change. I’ve talked about possibly implementing what I’m calling a genius bar in schools where technology can be dropped off, picked up, changed, worked on that kind of, you know, those that really doesn’t exist in schools right now to where there’s a counter where somebody could come up to that’s not in school or not going to school where they could get their technology managed in some way I could see that happen.
Judy Sparks:
That’s a fantastic idea that really is very user friendly and, and customer oriented. I think that would be a very progressive thing for K-12 education to adopt,
Jere Smith:
Even if we didn’t go, you know, we moved back away from the virtual platform. I still think having something like that, the school kids were still, you know, it was almost one-to-one technology in any way. So something always going on with your technology. So having that kind of space or place where you could get your technology worked on essentially in school,
Judy Sparks:
Kind of effect, is this having on your auxiliary services, like your food service and your transportation what have been the biggest impacts on those non-instructional operations?
Jere Smith:
Right? Well, frankly, there are a lot of employees that either drove buses or cooked that don’t have things to do right now. And I think they’re doing other things about the district.We are still feeding, I don’t know, they have the exact numbers, what we’re providing thousands of meals every day to students. Now we’re just cooking and five kitchens around the city and those meals are distributed by our transportation folks. So that’s still going on, but you know, the day in day out cooking thousands of meals for students at lunch that’s just not happening right now. Same thing with transportation, you know, extracurricular activities are going on. So football is still going on. Basketball is going on, we’re moving into basketball season. So transportation, our department, transportation department still handling those moves around town. So that’s still ongoing, but yeah, it’s had a significant impact on both food service and, and transportation.
Judy Sparks:
So Jere, we know you’re very involved in your profession and you give back to the design and construction and education professions through your participation, through trade organizations. We mentioned 4LE, I know you’ve been involved in other like design and construction associations. What are some of the hot topics in your industry circles these days in terms of how designers and contractors and owners are thinking about the future and building for the future?
Jere Smith:
This isn’t a bad thing necessarily. But I think there’s a quite a bit of uneasiness out there. People are just wondering, what’s going to happen. Is there another economic shoe to drop at some point? Because I think for the most part while I know some people in our industry probably have been significantly impacted. I think for the most part, a lot of things have kind of continued on, but I think there is a lot of uneasiness out there about what’s going to happen next. Especially with travelhospitality restaurant, I mean, you just got to start wondering what’s going to happen. I look at downtown Atlanta, I drove through downtown the other night and it’s virtually empty. I mean, sitting there at the rips downtown, the 191 building, there’s just nobody in those spaces. And if we don’t somehow move back, what is going to happen to those kinds of spaces, what’s going to go on, you know, they require large amounts of cash moving through them and rent and other types of services to keep, you know, sustain them and keep them going. If we don’t move back to that, at least a significant part of that environment, what is going to happen?
Judy Sparks:
Sure. I mean, workplace is going to, well, I think it’s valid. I think every business owner myself included, is looking at our obligations on the corporate lease side. And as we’ve been productive since March working remotely, it’s a valid question. Whether or not we will go back to a physical environment the way we were. I think we’ll always need a place to gather and collaborate, but do we need an office every single day of the workweek? Not so much. And I think we’ve proven that, and I think a lot of companies are coming to that realization as well. So Jere, do you want to share any parting words of wisdom in terms of, you know, thank goodness 2020 is almost a wrap, right? We’re sitting here this episode will air before the end of the year, but we’re sitting here Thanksgiving week and at Smartegies, we are extremely thankful for people like yourself and our essential construction workers and everything moving forward. But I just am wondering, you know, what does 2021 hold? And what are some of the, the big items you wish to tackle next year in your role at APS?
Jere Smith:
We are about 40 months into a 60 months for our cycle. So we’re already starting to talk with some of our brother and sister districts around the Metro area are starting to talk about going for another round of SPLOST sometime late 21 or 22. Getting prepared for thatgetting a facilities plan done and a roster of projects lined up, there’s some logic to, and make sense and that our constituents want, I mean, if they don’t want these projects, there’s no reason for me to do. But I think part of my job is to get those things teed up and get these needs and projects kind of put in front of people so they can basically vote them up or vote them down. So 21 will likely keep me busy doing a lot of that. Then we’ve got our share of projects that are continuing on through the next year. I don’t want to say we were at a slow point, but our program kind of ebbs and flows and we were moving into a somewhat slower cycle where we were doing some more planning and designing. At some point we’ll move back into the heavy construction phase, but getting prepared for that, A big, big agenda item for 21.
Judy Sparks:
That’s awesome. So is there a magic place that the vendor community can go or the public can go to see what might be forecasted for that SPLOST and what types of projects and priorities the constituents are asking for,
Jere Smith:
Right. There will be, there’s not at this point, cause nothing’s really been done yet. It’ll be in a lot more plans we were doing in the middle of a big facilities plan that was supposed to wrap up at Christmas time. And it’s just not going to happen now. We hope it can be the first quarter or maybe even the second quarter of 21. So things were getting pushed back a little bit just because we can’t have the public meetings and the public engagement and some of this big stuff, like, you know, half a billion dollars SPLOST, it’s tough to do them virtually. We may end up doing it virtually, but we’re still kind of holding out hoping we can do some public engagement, but you know, again, that’s what 21 is going to kind of,
Judy Sparks:
Well, we look forward to hearing a bit more about it, and now we have an excuse to have you back on our show next season, once you know, what’s going in this SPLOST to talk more more about this.
Jere Smith:
And as soon as we know those things, if you go on our website now under facilities, there’s an E-SPLOST tab, but it’s current SPLOST stuff. So when we have the new program laid out and at some point it’ll get posted on the website, there’s just nothing right now.
Judy Sparks:
And we’ll just count on you letting us know when it’s available and distributing that to our audience. But we really appreciate you taking the time to not only do this once for us, but now twice. And Jere, I have to say I echo Katie. When I tell you that you are a fan favorite, the entire design and construction community involved in K-12 in Atlanta, just absolutely adores you. And it’s really thankful to have you on the owner side. And they find you to be a great partner. That’s the feedback we always hear, and we really appreciate you taking the time to do this for us today.
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