FACILITY DEVELOPMENTS

During the campus closure, we were able to take advantage and invest heavily in facility upgrades and retrofits. Most notable was the renovation of the Elementary School (ES) Cafeteria, which was purposebuilt for elementary students with appropriately sized furniture and serving counters.

The ES Cafeteria’s service station is uniquely designed, so the floor where cafeteria staff stands is lower on the staff side than the student side, thus putting staff and students at equal eye level. Similar to the middle and high school cafeteria, elementary students are now asked to be responsible for bringing their plates to the return station after their meals. The food preparation space has a sizable seamless glass window through which students can observe the bustling activity in the kitchen and discover how their food is made. The design also incorporates floorto-ceiling windows that provide wonderful views of the playgrounds, athletics fields, and turtle pond. A coffee corner was constructed on the ES cafeteria terrace so students and parents can now enjoy drinks and bakery items near the playgrounds and athletics facilities.

Our students were most excited by the completion of the new Sky Park and Parkour Park playgrounds. After opening the Panther Park early childhood playground in the previous year, we were able to complete the second phase of our playground vision by converting the basketball hardtop and the “Big Toy” into new age-appropriate play areas inspired by ES students’ designs created during the “Playground Design Challenge,’’ where students worked alongside our designer to imagine new play spaces. The trampoline, zip lines, and the “highest slide ever” were all part of the original student designs, as was the possibility to traverse from the ES along the fields to the playground without ever touching the “hot lava” below…The playgrounds are designed to challenge our learners physically and mentally while providing fun, stimulating creativity, and allowing them to take developmentally appropriate risks.

As part of making learning more transparent, we replaced classroom doors schoolwide. These new glass doors connect the inside and outside environments providing interconnectivity between learning spaces and the surrounding environment. They are also fully integrated with our access control system, providing increased security. Other capital projects included increasing the school’s electric capacity to have a second alternative source that helps us during brown-outs; ongoing painting of the campus; installation of a new Public Address system; installation of a new roof on the gyms to prepare for installing solar panels in the summer of 2022; plus significant investments in landscaping to continue to have the school look beautiful and natural. We also planted (fruit) trees, plants, and flowers which have brought fauna back on campus, including three beautiful owls that have made their home in the Early Childhood garden.