The Del Mar Union School District serves students in Preschool through sixth grades in north coastal San Diego County. The district includes 9 schools in the cities of Del Mar and San Diego with a total enrollment of approximately 3,900 students.  

Over the last eight years, the District has focused on reimagining learning spaces to facilitate the experiences that students need to be successful in a rapidly changing world. Through an iterative process that started with pilot classrooms at two schools and spread to multiple grade levels, District leadership collaborated with Tangram, principals and classroom teachers to trial and test environment options, including flooring, use of whiteboards, classroom technology, and a variety of flexible furniture.  As the optimal classroom environment came into focus, the District committed funds from a voter-passed general obligation bond to modernize classrooms at every school on an annual basis. Rather than making students and teachers at newer schools wait until their whole site got its turn for modernization, grade levels at each school are modernized each summer. Combined with high-quality professional learning, this rolling modernization built capacity across school sites while also building excitement and interest in the parent community.  

With user testing and research in our back pocket, Tangram provided a range of Norva Nivel furniture for kindergarten through 6th grade classrooms. The focus of the furniture installation has been to provide comfortable, flexible learning spaces that allow students and teachers to easily configure and reconfigure the space to facilitate small group, large group, and individual learning needs.  A culture of thinking that embraces student agency and empowerment is at the center of all classroom modernizations.

“In conjunction with support from a variety of vendors, the team at Tangram assisted us in the selection, purchasing, and installation of flexible furnishings for multiple classrooms across several schools in the Del Mar Union School District this past summer," says Alison Fieberg, Assistant Superintendent of Instructional Services, DMUSD. "Their detailed renders made it so that our installation process was smooth and that teachers were able to enter their new classroom environments to start the year with a vision of how the furniture could initially be set up to provide different learning opportunities for students.”

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