Movable Walls in Spokane Middle Schools | Modernfold

Modernfold manufactures operable partitions, glass wall systems and accordion doors, specified and installed through licensed local distributors. In Spokane, Washington, distributor Dupree Building Specialties worked with Public School District 81 across a six-school programme of new construction and replacement.

The project

In 2018, voters approved a USD 553 million bond for the district, which today comprises seven high schools, six middle schools and 34 elementary schools. The bond funded three new middle schools and the complete replacement of three ageing ones. The design concept the district required contractors to advance was pod-based learning: classrooms that function as independent rooms but can open into a shared environment, with the capacity to open entire wings of the building for collaborative lessons, joint homeroom sessions, projects and student events. A second requirement ran through all six buildings — the surrounding evergreens and rolling hills were to remain visible from inside the classrooms.

Those two requirements pull against each other in a way that determines the partition strategy. A wall that divides acoustically tends to block light and view; a wall that preserves both tends not to divide acoustically. The resolution across the six schools was to use different products at different positions in the plan rather than one product everywhere.

The products in use

In total, 241 Modernfold movable walls were installed across the six middle schools. Acousti-Clear® glass walls were specified at classroom frontages, where daylight and visual connection to the corridor and the landscape matter most, while Acousti-Seal® acoustic panels serve as interior dividers between classrooms, where sound separation is the governing requirement.

Carla Olman Peperzak Middle School, the last of the six to be completed, illustrates the mix. Integrus Architecture and Garco Construction worked with the distributor to install 24 Acousti-Clear® paired panel walls rated at 45 STC, with clear anodized frames selected to match the adjacent window frames so that the movable walls read as part of the building's glazing rather than as inserted equipment. Alongside them, 14 Acousti-Seal® Premier® paired panels rated at 50 STC were finished in a naturalist palette of vinyl with natural choice trim and markerboard faces.

School-by-school adaptation

Each of the six schools was treated as a separate design problem. At Pauline Flett Middle School, the distributor proposed window cut-outs within the operable walls so that external light continues to reach the classroom even when the partitions are closed — a detail worth noting for any school where the divided condition, not the open one, is the daily norm. At Sacajawea Middle School, where very large glass movable walls were required, product knowledge was used to bring the specification within budget. Because the distributor is local to the community, service and maintenance are available on an ongoing basis, which matters for a partition operated several times a day by teaching staff.

The result

Teachers report positive responses to the light and the views, and the walls have made higher levels of collaboration practical to build into the curriculum rather than treating them as an occasional exception.

Technical documentation and brochures for the Acousti-Clear® and Acousti-Seal® product families are available from the manufacturer. Click here to download.