European School-Construction Group Opens Its Doors to American States

By Peter Schmidt

A Paris-based organization of foreign governments concerned with school-construction issues has opened its doors to participation by individual states in this country in hopes of exchanging ideas across the Atlantic.

In joining the organization, school-construction authorities from the United States may find ways to build better, cheaper facilities by emulating innovative school design and construction in Europe and elsewhere, experts on school construction say.

Gov. William Donald Schaefer of Maryland last week was seeking to make his state the first in the nation to join the Programme on Educational Building, an organization with representatives from 18 countries, most of them European, that promotes the international exchange of ideas...