When junior Kate Brinkman walked into Mike Nordean’s remodeled classroom, she was intrigued by the room. She also felt excited by the seating options, interesting layout and comfortable atmosphere.

According to the St. Louis Park school district superintendent Robert Metz, the Learning Design Team (LDT) works to improve school facilities by analyzing existing facilities and making recommendations about improvements.

“The learning design team is a group of community members, teachers, parents and even a student who looked at all of our facilities and are helping the school board by making a recommendation to them of what they think we should do with our facilities to improve them,” Metz said.

Last year, the LDT redesigned social studies teacher Mike Nordean’s classroom. According to Nordean, the room has maintained its original quality.

“So far so good. The only issues we’ve had (are) those little white tables. Those are not as well made as I’d like but that’s really the only flaw,”  Nordean said.

Nordean said he believes the room has aided his teaching and his students learning.

“It’s quiet in here, the carpet helps a lot. I think the lighting is nice in that it is bright enough yet I can affect the different banks of lights and so there are many options with the lighting configuration which is nice. I think TVs help because it doesn’t lock a kid to only be looking here and depending upon where you’re sitting the smaller TVs might be the better view,” Nordean said.

Junior Kate Brinkman said she enjoys some of the features the LDT remodeled room offers.

“I do I like that there are tables and it’s not just like regular desks and stuff. It also has a cool wall and you can write on it,” Brinkman said.

Over the summer, the LDT also implemented changes to the cafeteria. The LDT drafted 3 financial propositions  for the school board in which each called for a cafeteria redesign Metz explained.

“The learning design team really had three different financial targets to give recommendations for. The school board asked them to come up with a plan if we spent about 40 million dollars,” Metz said.

The school board also asked the LDT to come up with a plan with spendings for 75 and 125 million dollars. Metz said he noticed similarities between all the plans.

“In all three of those versions they are recommending that we expand the size of the cafeteria kind of like it is now. This last summer we redid the flooring and added new furniture. The next step would be to make it bigger and to build a new kitchen so we’d have new kitchen equipment and new serving area, so that was one of the things they prioritized the very highly,” Metz said.