HPM Hires Director of Planning Services
We are pleased to announce the hiring of Scott Leopold as Director of Planning Services at HPM. Scott will work alongside Tracy Richter, Vice President of Planning Services at HPM, to expand our partnerships with K-12 school districts in markets throughout the Southeast, bolster existing relationships with clients and enhance the overall facility planning process for bond programs.
Scott joins the company with more than 17 years of experience in facility planning and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) services, having coordinated and led capacity and utilization analyses, educational adequacy assessments, demographic analyses and enrollment projections for K-12 school districts of all sizes. He previously served as partner at Cooperative Strategies, where he worked with school districts across the country to lead successful facilities master planning projects and assist with implementation of GIS programs. Within the past decade, Scott has toured more than 500 schools and worked on projects in 100 school districts. He has also worked as a subcontractor on numerous jobs with HPM previously and collaborated with Tracy on many of these projects.
Using his experience in GIS, Scott will work to enhance the methods used by our planning services team to present data to clients and build new strategies using advanced digital platforms to make the process more interactive and convenient. The creation of online mapping applications and the use of dashboards will allow our clients to visualize large amounts of data in a way that is digestible and easy to understand. He hopes to expand this concept to projects within other sectors in the HPM portfolio, as well.
“My passion lies in understanding the wants and needs of communities that often have strong emotional attachment to their school systems, and turning that into data that can be used to improve education facilities,” said Scott. “As conditions continue to change across our industry and the need for adaptability increases, it is time to move into the next generation of interactive data presentation to make the planning process smoother for these communities. HPM has established a track record of excellence within facility planning, and I look forward to continuing this pattern of success and strengthening client relationships alongside Tracy.”
With the addition of Scott, our planning services team will continue to provide comprehensive oversight and guidance on capital and operational building programs, providing a holistic scope to clients offering a life cycle of services from planning to implementation. Scott will help to lead our client initiatives and engage with new K-12 school districts seeking to begin planning for bond programs.
“In any facilities planning project, our end goal is always to have an informed community that supports its school system and is excited to implement improvements to make those schools function at the highest possible level,” said Tracy. “I believe Scott’s drive to make the entire process as inclusive and community-driven as possible will only take HPM’s planning services capabilities to the next level. His knowledge combined with our experience in successful K-12 planning will continue to drive cost and time savings for our clients.”
We are currently involved in numerous K-12 planning projects across the region, including a $280 million bond program for the Manor Independent School District in Manor Texas, Facility Master Planning for Round Rock ISD and South Bend Community Schools and Pre-Bond Planning Services for Nampa Schools.
With a presence throughout the U.S. and a total management portfolio value of $1+ billion annually, we have established ourselves as one of the industry’s leading program managers and owner’s representative companies. Our recent notable clients and accounts include a program management contract for Airbus’ campus including the A320 and A220 assembly lines in Mobile, Alabama; an assignment to lead the site selection process, planning, design and construction of Boom Supersonic’s first manufacturing facility; project management services for several new minor league baseball ballparks and major league spring training facilities in Florida; a preconstruction services and construction administration contract for facilities owned by Regions Financial Corporation; a partnership with the World Games 2022 as the official program management partner; and program management services for multiple K-12 school districts and higher education institutions throughout the South.
