Answers to your Schilling Center and renovation questions

Ellie Nowakowski, Illustrations/Infographics|November 15, 2017

The concrete has been poured onto the floors of the Schilling Center and construction has moved from the outside in as winter approaches. As the new Upper School building continues to develop just outside the windows of classrooms, student curiosity is piqued. Speculation, discussion and questions have flooded the hallways and classrooms, but little has been given by way of an explanation. A conversation with Upper School Principal Chris Hughes answered many students burning questions.

One of the biggest motives for renovating the school and creating the Schilling Center is to accommodate a growing curriculum, set of extracurriculars and need for space.

A constant complaint about the school is its lack of common spaces and areas for students to hang out or do homework. This is one of the main focuses of the design of the Schilling Center.

“[There will be] tons [of commons spaces], that’s actually one of the biggest upgrades overall. The amount of space for both individual space for students to work, small group spaces, and just common areas where students can hang out and work on a group project, will greatly increase,” US principal Chris Hughes said.

Part of the process of creating more commons spaces will be moving lockers out of hallways and into classrooms, both in the current buildings and in the Schilling Center. The location of a student’s locker will not correlate with their advisory space, because classrooms will contain more lockers than there will be students in that advisory. Hughes explains that moving lockers out of hallways will free up hallway space to create more students commons.

In addition, both classroom size and number of classrooms will be increased for the math and science departments in the Schilling Center. There are currently four math classrooms and next fall there will be six classrooms, each about 1.5 times larger. The science department will have three wet labs, rather than two, as well as two physics rooms, a separate Advanced Science Research room and two “engineering and design labs,” Hughes said.

“Both the science and math departments have given their input into what sorts of furniture they want, … they’ve chosen what sorts of lab equipment for science or worktables they want for math, so the departments have made those choices,” Hughes said.

The spaces are not the only aspect of the math and science centers that are developing and changing with the school. The Schilling Center will feature a new set of classes, in addition to the ones currently offered or required.

“The science department is working on a set of new electives, [which] will be announced by the time we get back from spring break,” Hughes said.

A common misconception about the Schilling Center is that the building will not be complete by the beginning of next year. This is not the case, and the construction of the Schilling Center will be done by Aug. 2018. It is by Jan. 2019 that every classroom and area in all buildings will be fully renovated, and students and teachers will formally move out of the temporary classrooms.

The older buildings are getting a new design and layout, and everything will be fully renovated to make way for the language, history, and English classes that will be taking over these areas. The history department will be located on all four floors of old main, the areas that are currently occupied by a different thing on each floor. The fourth floor of old main currently holds English offices and tutoring rooms. Directly underneath are several english classrooms, underneath that are the administrative offices and finally, the senior hallway, where the senior lounge and a set of bathrooms are located. The English and Language departments will move to the current math and science wings. Completely new areas will take shape around the school to create a better learning environment for these departments. The computer science classroom in the second half of the lower library will become the upper school office and the Principal, Dean and Ms. Parham will have offices in that area.

Students have noticed that the school’s library has gotten significantly smaller in the past few years. It will be getting smaller with the renovations to the Upper School, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that there will be fewer books.

“We are going to continue to rethink what we need in terms of the number of books, so there will still be books in the library, but we think we can decrease the number of volumes [and] increase the number of stacks where the books are kept in the upper library. We also don’t need big common spaces because there will be so many common spaces in the rest of the school. What we can really do in the library is have individual study spaces and the books. If you look at the library there’s a ton of open space right now. There will be less open space after the renovations because there’s going to be more open space in the rest of the school, so the library is going to be designed for research and quiet study,” Hughes said.

Other students have expressed their concern about taking away the historical pieces that were in the old history and language wings. An example of how the school is working to preserve these historical pieces is the wood from the walls in the old history office. The wood will be where the bathrooms in the senior hallway are currently, which will have two new classrooms after renovations.

“The centerpiece, as you’re walking down the hall from college counseling, is going to be a sitting area and all of the wood paneling is going to go there,” Hughes said.

As for the other historic pieces from the school:

“All of the major historical elements, they have taken out and preserved to put back wherever they can put them,” Hughes said.

Both of these renovated buildings will be connected by “A two-level walkway, including some glass connectors, right into Schilling,” Hughes said.

The whole project will help to facilitate an environment in which students are better equipped to learn. Spaces in both buildings have been developed specifically for the courses that will be taught within their walls and for the students that will study, learn and work together in them.