The Unknown Shaper

"That's the new school" is a prideful remark that almost all Americans can make in showing off their communities. In thousands of cases, the shape, size and equipment of the new building owe everything to the little-known profession of school consulting. The best-known of the consultants is Nickolaus L. Engelhardt, 58, a nerveless, gruffly warm expert whose firm, the busiest in the nation, has helped 800 school boards mold the down-to-earth terms of education for millions of kids.

Engelhardt tries to keep boards from underbuilding or overbuilding, from going overboard for fads or neglecting useful innovation. He is often the broker between ambitious school administrators and hard-nosed board members, or between visionary boards and a skeptical public. Generally, the test of his adjudication comes when taxpayers vote on a bond issue; he does not get his full .5% commission unless the issue passes and plans are approved. Working nationwide out of a clapboard rural headquarters in tiny Purdy Station, N.Y., his firm of Engelhardt, Engelhardt and Leggett now proposes some $380 million in school construction a year, compared with $147 million ten years ago. It wins about 95% of the elections on which it is consulted.

An $11,800,000 High School. The firm's success arises from thorough planning and from shunning what Michigan State Education Professor Donald Leu terms "parachute surveys," in which a consultant "drops in, studies the situation, and runs like hell." Engelhardt sticks around to face all the local pressures, averages four nights a week on some school stage patiently explaining his proposals. He pins down his arguments with facts, rarely retreats. When a woman at a Cape Cod meeting demanded to know what the alternatives to Engelhardt's plans were, he replied dryly: "A second-rate school system."

Engelhardt welcomes every question. 'It's the people who don't come to the meetings that concern me," he says. Once he plodded door-to-door in rural W. Hampshire to explain his plans in iving rooms. Recently he helped persuade residents of Greenwich, Conn., hat they could afford a new high school costing $11,800,000. Even Indiana's less affluent Lawrence Township approved Engelhardt's $5,000,000 high school. "It's air-conditioned and has a swimming pool; yet we didn't have any kind of friction at all," boasts Superintendent Edwin Estell.

Engelhardt's late father, an education professor, helped create one of the nation's first educational-consultant organizations at Columbia Teachers College in 1917. He set up a private operation in 1947 with his son Nick and Stanton Leggett, a Ph.D. in education from Columbia. Nick had studied engineering at Yale, worked as a planner for Architect Wallace Harrison and earned a Ph.D. in educational administration at Columbia.

Engelhardt looks at innovation with a cold eye: "There are an awful lot of people in education who feel change is necessary for change's sake." Some changes that he does back are team teaching, mechanized language labs, individual study carrels, large lecture classrooms in combination with small seminar rooms--and swimming pools.

Quiet Suggestions. Engelhardt belittles his influence. "Don't forget, you're going to make all the decisions," he tells his audiences. Yet he concedes that his quiet campaign to locate a Charlotte, N.C., school between white and Negro neighborhoods as "the best available site" helped ease integration. He grouped .hop, fine-arts and home-arts facilities in a Scarsdale, N.Y., high school around a common foyer with glass walls, which led the three teachers to note duplication and initiate a combined "family arts" course. The installation of waist-level windows in the corridors of an Indiana school did wonders for pupil discipline; the principal could walk the halls, spot any disorder.

More or less in the pattern set by Engelhardt's father, about 200 school consultants practice in the U.S. today. Their mission, in Engelhardt's quiet definition, is to "keep people from making simple mistakes."

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