THE SPIRIT OF ST. LOUIS a weekly bulletin & newsletter September 30, 2018 • 26 th Sunday in Ordinary Time
The PEC to become our new School & Parish library. Over the past year, Fr. James and a number of parishioners and employees have been strategizing the future of the PEC, our original church. When we renovated the building directly south of the main church into our new parish offices, we were able to house all of our church employees in one building. This has proven to be a huge benefit for our team and our parishioners, helping our service to the parish be more efficient and organized. It also left the PEC, previously our Lifelong Christian Formation office, free for another use. In our conversations, a number of ideas came and went. There was the thought of a new performing arts center. Another idea was to create a small reception hall. We even thought of using the PEC for a school theater. But as we continued to vision the future of such an interesting and important building, we finally landed on a new library for the school, which would also be open to the parish a few nights per week. Simultaneously with this work, we were blessed with two generous donors who gave us $600,000 for this renovation of the PEC into our new Library. There was an initial gift of $400k from a donor, which was combined to a second gift of $200k. And so, with that funding, as well as support from the school Home and School Association who raised $70k for library upgrades of furniture and new book additions to the collection, we are well on our way to this new place for our students and parishioners to gather for reading and learning. Beginning in December you will see construction teams begin the process of removing the top floor and all of the offices on the main floor. These were additions made to the PEC back in the early 80’s. Our goal is to bring the space back to its original look when it was our main church. Then, retaining that historic look, we will usher in a new chapter of the building by making it a Library, Media Center, and Makers Space. The new space will be somewhere between Oxford University and Austin Contemporary. The main floor will be an open space all the way up to the original ceiling of the church. We will house not only our full library collection form the school in the space but also our outstanding collection from our parish library that has been created over the past thirty years. The basement will be made into a makerspace. “A makerspace can be anything from a repurposed bookcart filled with arts and crafts supplies to a table in a corner set out with LEGOs to a full blown fab lab with 3D printers, laser cutters, and hand tools. Makers are artists, crafters, knitters, seamstresses, builders, programmers, engineers, painters, woodworkers, tinkerers, inventors, graphic designers and more.” http://renovatedlearning.com/2015/04/02/defining-makerspaces-part-1/ This will be an amazing improvement to our current makerspace in the school, which is confined in two small former offices. continued on page 3 >>