Unique Impressions
May 1, 2008 12:00 PM, By Mike Kennedy
Imagination and creative design can transform unlikely sites into successful learning environments.
Power House High will not have a gymnasium, but it will be able to take advantage of many of the services and facilities that have sprung up in 20 years of redevelopment at the old Sears campus. Those include a swimming pool and gymnasium run by the city park district, a health center, a YMCA and a computer lab.
Also being built near the Power House is Holy Family Lutheran School, which will serve children in grade pre-K to 8. While the Power House renovations continue, Henry Ford Learning Institute will use the third floor of the Holy Family school in 2008-09 to house Power House High for its inaugural year.
“They'll be right across the street from the Power House, and they'll be able to see what's going on with construction,” says Dean.
In its first year, Power House High will have only freshman; 606 students applied to attend, and 120 were chosen through a lottery. Most of the applicants are from West Side neighborhoods near the school. Power House High will add a grade each subsequent year until it becomes a four-year high school.
A long search
The Henry Ford Learning Institute was able to identify a site in Chicago early on in the process of creating the school. But often, the momentum for opening a school can outpace the ability of school leaders to find the right facility.
“We spent seven years looking for a permanent facility,” says Angela Naples, principal of The Atlanta Academy, a non-denominational Christian school for grades pre-K to 8. While looking in Atlanta's suburbs for land to build a permanent site, it housed its classrooms in trailers and a rented church basement in Sandy Springs, Ga.
“Everything we looked at was too expensive or not large enough,” Naples recalls of the site search.
Eventually, school leaders concluded that they were unlikely to find land to build on, so they shifted their search to include existing facilities. Eight miles away from its rented site was vacant space in a strip shopping mall in Roswell, Ga. Naples says some involved with the school were not enthusiastic about such a facility, but after years of looking, she was eager to have a permanent home, even if it wasn't ideal.
“We were looking for something that would work,” says Naples.
The site was a 60,000-square-foot space in the center of a 90,000-square-foot shopping strip. It previously had housed a furniture store and had briefly been the home of a Fulton County charter high school.
“It was a nasty, beat-up space,” say Tim Fish and Nate Williamson, architects with Cooper Carry, which designed the conversion of the old store. “We had to make it look more like a school.”
That's what the space looked like when the Atlanta Academy opened the doors to its new home in 2007. “They really did a beautiful layout. It far exceeded our expectations. The outside still looks like a shopping center, but inside, it's an unbelievable school.”
Academy officials had feared they would lose enrollment by relocating the campus; some students did leave when the school moved, but new students replaced them, and the enrollment remained steady at about 165, Naples says. The school signed a five-year lease-purchase agreement with the owner that eventually would give the academy ownership of the entire shopping strip. With the additional space, the facility will be able to accommodate more than 400 students.
That will happen sooner than expected. After the new Atlanta Academy was unveiled, the building's owner decided to forgo the purchase agreement and donate the entire facility to the school.
“It gives a five-year jump start,” says Naples. “It allows us to really do things the right way.”
Instead of spending time and energy raising money to pay rent on the facility and carry out needed renovations, the school can accelerate the process of improving and expanding the campus. They can use the property they own as collateral for loans to pay for campus improvements. That includes elements such as converting parking areas to green space for play fields, adding a performing-arts center and altering the outside appearance of the facility so it is more school-like.
“It's not your typical school space,” says Fish. “It has a community and collaborative environment that parents can see and appreciate.”
Kennedy, staff writer, can be reached at mkennedy@asumag.com.
Power it green
In transforming the century-old Sears Power House to a high school, designers and developers are planning a facility that is sensitive to 21st-century concerns about energy consumption and environmental impact.
The renovation and redesign of the facility is aiming to receive LEED gold certification for environmentally sensitive design from the U.S. Green Building Council.
Skylights and windows will provide the facility with ample amounts of daylight. A former railroad embankment is being converted into green space for students, and a geothermal heating and cooling system will be buried below it. The smokestack that rises high above the facility will be preserved, and a wind turbine will be incorporated into it. Other green elements include energy recovery ventilators, high-efficiency lighting and stormwater recovery.
The Henry Ford Institute plans to have an energy-monitoring kiosk that will provide real-time monitoring of building energy consumption, and allow students and building users to see the impact of their energy decisions.
If the shoe factory fits…
Attending the Cabool, Mo., campus of Drury University wasn't much different from going to high school. That's because Drury's Cabool campus, about 75 miles east of the main Springfield campus, was at the high school in Cabool.
School officials were eager to find a permanent site for the branch campus. They found one when the owners of a shoe factory that closed in the 1990s offered the facility to the university. The 10,000 square feet of space includes seven classrooms, including a science and computer lab, conference room and office space. The school also has plans to add an auditorium.
“It gives us a chance to have tables and chairs instead of high school desks, and classrooms that are more suitable for adult learners,” says Parris Watts, dean of Drury's College of Graduate and Continuing Studies.
The new campus provides students with a more collegiate atmosphere and enables Drury to expand its offerings in Cabool into daytime hours. The building was given a new modern-looking facade adorned with the Drury University logo.
Lu Adams, director of the Cabool program, says the factory space basically was a “huge, open space” that has been partitioned for classrooms and labs. “I don't think when you sit inside the classrooms, you can tell it used to be a shoe factory,” says Adams.
The old factory has additional space available. Adams says the university is willing to accept other businesses as neighbors “as long as we don't have anything noisy or smelly next to us.”
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