P2S Thought Leadership Series
K-12 districts across the West Coast are balancing multiple big priorities: modernizing aging campuses, improving indoor air quality and comfort, strengthening life-safety and code compliance, and delivering new learning environments. Whether it’ s designing modern classrooms enhanced for digital learning, career and technical education spaces, performing arts facilities, athletic buildings or even student / community-use spaces, P2S has the experience to get projects off the ground. We know it all has to happen within seasonal school schedules, tight budgets, and often on occupied campuses where safety and continuity are non-negotiable.
K-12 Studio Leaders Amanda Miranda and Cesar Rodriguez work with districts and project teams to translate educational goals into coordinated building systems solutions. They, along with the studios they lead, align mechanical, electrical, plumbing, fire protection, and technology systems with the realities of school district phasing, DSA approval, and long-term performance. We spoke to them to gain insight into the many challenges and the intense satisfaction of delivering design solutions to educators and students.
Thanks for joining us Studio Leaders. We’ re excited to learn from your unique experiences designing for the K-12 sector. From your perspective, what are the biggest forces shaping K-12 projects right now? What changes have there been in the last two years?
Amanda Miranda: One of the big things that we’ re seeing impacting all disciplines is this movement towards electrification and decarbonization. For plumbing specifically, we’ re moving away from gas-type equipment to electric equipment. We’ re also seeing that there’ s more of a demand for domestic hot water use in different spaces. In the past, many areas required just cold water, but now there’ s a requirement for tempered water.
FEATURING K-12 Design Studio Leaders
Amanda Miranda, Cesar Rodriguez,
urgency. The districts are communicating to their voters the need to improve education and efficiency for educational purposes, but also to enhance safety, especially fire life safety systems, on their existing campuses. Particularly with the San Diego Unified School District, deferred maintenance has created many gaps in code compliance and system reliability. So, over the last decade or so, and especially over the last two years, we’ ve seen a shift towards modernizing and replacing those aging systems with new features.
How are districts investing in their facilities these days? What are the driving forces behind these investments?
Amanda Miranda: As I mentioned earlier, there is more of an emphasis on hot water demand in some cases, and I think this is driven by general public health and safety for the most part. After 2020, with COVID and whatnot, there’ s been a stronger desire for more sanitation. Another aspect is the types of domestic water heating equipment. Since we’ re moving away from gas or natural gas, we’ re using all-electric equipment. So, in some instances, we’ re looking at heat pump water heaters where it’ s feasible and suitable. We’ re seeing that even more prevalently in our higher education projects. And I think that’ s due to shifts in codes: the California plumbing code, the energy code, and building code.
Cesar Rodriguez: From my perspective, looking at the San Diego market, the biggest forces shaping the K-12 sector are safety and aging infrastructure. We’ re dealing with a lot of older campuses, dating back to the 50s or even older, that need modernization and funding-driven
Another element I feel like is worth mentioning, though it’ s not everywhere in K-12, is the desire for metering for different systems. On older projects, we would mainly see, for example, a water meter for one whole project site, but now we’ re seeing meters at buildings and per
4 P2S MAGAZINE WINTER 2026