I can’t often make a statement like this, but the campus has become noisier now that the students have departed for their summer break.
The reason? The heavy machinery has arrived and work has begun on the third building project during my time at Awty – the 15,000 square feet extension to the Lower School. How some of our younger students must wish they could be at school to watch the action instead of having to be at home on holidays ;-)
When it is finished in early 2014, the new addition will have added nine new classrooms to the Lower School, plus a large media facility, a computer lab, a
drama classroom, an art room that will be flooded with natural light, a teacher workroom, and a new medical clinic.
Also included as part of the Lower School extension project is a new playground where the old bus circle is currently located. It will feature shade structures, playground equipment, seating areas, and rubber fall surfaces. In the meantime, the old playground has been relocated so that younger children will still have a safe play
area while the construction is underway.
Planning for the Lower School extension has been underway now for almost two years. Although we have had to work within some surprisingly tight financial and regulatory constraints, and thus prune some of the features that we had originally aspired to include, I am very confident that the new facility will
represent a huge advance in the quality of the learning facilities we offer to our students.
When I first saw Awty International School with my own eyes about three years ago, I was often asked by people I met what I saw as the biggest challenge facing the school. At the time, I invariably answered “facilities”, on the basis that the student population was growing but the quality of facilities had not kept pace. Many of the school’s buildings at the time were converted warehouses made with corrugated metal and demountable (portable) buildings. Now that two major building projects have transformed the campus over the past couple of years, adding (among other things) almost 40 new classrooms, and given that a third building project
is now underway, I no longer have to identify ‘facilities’ as being our biggest challenge.
Planning for a new building such as the Lower School extension requires a certain degree of what I call ‘informed prophesy’. We are, after all, starting to build a facility that will need to last for many decades, and yet we can’t really be certain of the characteristics that will direct education a few decades from now. Our draft Strategic Plan (that I mentioned and linked in last week’s blog) tries to identify
some of these ‘megatrends’, but of course, predicting the future has always been and always will be a contentious undertaking.
A compelling article came to my attention this week on this precise point. Written by Milton Chen and entitled “The Best Way to Predict the Future is to Invent It”, the article appears in the latest issue of ‘Independent School Magazine”. Focussing especially on technology, the article makes very challenging reading for those of us who are trying to “future-proof” school curricula and facilities.
I especially liked his sentence “Changing our thinking about the nature of teaching and learning is the most difficult challenge we face, not unlike changing our political system or improving our environment.” Hear, hear! And to Chen’s comment, I would add the additional observation that it is also no less important. If you are interested in ‘future-proofing’ schools, and especially in the role that technology plays (and is likely to play in the future), please read of Chen’s article
HERE.
Exciting though the new Lower School extension undoubtedly is, the real excitement will come shortly after the new building has been completed. The new extension will finally provide the space we need to vacate ‘Big Blue’, and in summer 2014, the 72 year history of that vast corrugated metal structure will come to an end with its demolition, thus transforming a large section of our campus into a spacious, green, open area for children to run and play.
Now, just in case you got the idea from reading this that the campus is a cacophony of construction noise at the moment, I’ll finish by sharing the photo below, which shows our very quiet quad. The Lower School may be abuzz with construction, but the heart of the school has begun to enjoy its annual placid summer hibernation.