Proceedings of the Workshop on School Site Identification

Proceedings of a 2012 workshop on how school sites are identified and secured, which in Haiti is usually the binding constraint on school construction. The workshop's premise is that site selection had been handled as emergency management and needed to become anticipatory, with a procedures manual transferred to the central directorates and the departmental education directorates so that rational site management becomes permanent practice, and official texts issued to institute the new arrangements.

The case for that is made from the earthquake. More than 80 percent of the school stock in the Ouest and the Sud was affected, and in the departments struck by the earthquake around 80 percent of school infrastructure was damaged, while compliant construction had represented less than 3 percent of school premises beforehand, which the proceedings read as evidence of the absence of enforced norms rather than of bad luck.

The workshop then works through real site assessments, which is what makes the document useful. A first site is rejected because its slope varies from 40 to 60 percent with difficult access; a second, further downslope, is chosen with a moderate slope, though a 60 percent slope must still be traversed to reach the school. Criteria are stated as thresholds: a site on a mountain flank but with slope under 30 percent, land area of at least 3,000 square meters, with insufficient area defined as below that. On average more than 40 percent of proposed sites are rejected. Seismic parameters are specified in engineering terms, spectral acceleration at 0.2 and 1.0 second periods with a 2 percent probability of exceedance in 50 years, and soil investigation is to respect the AFNOR NF P 94 500 standard.