Schools play key roles in land use, community development and public policy issues. The construction of new schools, in particular, has come to be seen as a critical growth factor with broad impacts. A participatory school design process is proposed as a model to plan, design and build schools that respond to multiple stakeholder interests. In order to describe how such a process would work, research in urban design, school design, educational facility planning, and participatory design is combined with local case interviews. The results of the research and interviews promote an understanding of the challenges a participatory school design process would face, as well as the support on which such a process could develop. Ideas drawn from consensus building models and from urban design theorists address many of the challenges to which the cases provide no clear prescriptive guidance. These include the organization of a participatory process and the key physical design questions. Combining these models produces a basic framework for a participatory school design process. The framework recognizes that the uncertainty of institutional change and tensions that arise from basic value differences remain to be addressed through testing of the framework.