Colorado district groups with College Specialty to furnish and equip a $60M facility from finish to finish.
Jennifer Murtha, principal of Del Mar Academy in Aurora, Colorado, had a imaginative and prescient for what she wished the brand new faculty’s studying environments to appear to be and the way they’d operate.
“I wished a much less institutional appear and feel,” she says. “I wished smooth and laborious seating so that youngsters had decisions.”
Murtha and different leaders from the Aurora Public Colleges turned to College Specialty for assist in bringing this imaginative and prescient to life. Led by Senior Studying Surroundings Specialist Belinda Engles, Senior Inside Designer Emma Kopatich, and Strategic Account Chief Paula Florian, a staff of College Specialty professionals designed, furnished, and geared up a brand new faculty constructing that college students may take pleasure in—one which conjures up them to study day-after-day.
“We serve lots of youngsters who’ve grown up in poverty and who’ve had fairly tough occasions of their lives,” Murtha says. “There hasn’t been a brand new faculty on this neighborhood in 67 years. For them to have a phenomenal constructing is very nice. The neighborhood deserves it, our employees deserves it, and positively our children deserve it.”
Welcoming and Inclusive Studying Environments
The brand new Del Mar Academy, which opened in August 2023, serves college students in prekindergarten via seventh grade, with eighth graders being added for the 2025-26 faculty 12 months.
In designing the brand new facility, district leaders wished to create trendy studying environments that may be welcoming and inclusive for everybody, with comfy seating decisions to accommodate college students with totally different preferences, wants, and studying types.
Versatile furnishings empower lecturers to rearrange their school rooms in ways in which help totally different tutorial methods, whereas quite a lot of seating types empowers college students to decide on a mode that’s most conducive for them to study.
Fashionable, hands-on studying areas like a STEM lab and a digital arts studio allow college students to study future-ready expertise like coding and digital music manufacturing. “It’s about giving high-quality grade-level instruction to each pupil,” Murtha says.
The college’s center faculty school rooms embrace tall group tables in order that college students can stand and work in the event that they select. Elementary school rooms embrace conventional chairs and in addition swivel stools for college kids who’ve issue sitting nonetheless. Preschool school rooms embrace quite a few center-based actions comparable to water tables as a substitute of simply desks and chairs.
A sensory room inside the new faculty is designed to fulfill the wants of scholars who require extra sensory enter. It’s geared up with a bubble tube and different objects that present sensory stimulation. For example, sensory flooring tiles create liquid patterns when college students step on them, and LED furnishings cubes change colour when college students contact them. This helps college students assert management over their atmosphere, which promotes self-regulation expertise.
The sensory room is used for neurodivergent learners and people who need assistance calming down or regulating their feelings.
“It’s primarily for our special-needs college students, however our occupational therapists pull out college students from common training school rooms who want that degree of consideration as properly,” Murtha says. “The fantastic thing about this room is that youngsters can select what to do. We don’t inform them what to do in that house.”
Even the cafeteria is designed to present college students decisions, with conventional cafeteria tables but in addition café- fashion seating for small teams of two or three youngsters.
“College students can get their meals after which discover a seat that’s most comfy for them,” Murtha notes.
“On the finish of the day, no one desires to eat with 300 folks. It is a solution to give youngsters a bit extra company.”
Deliberately Designed
The group’s response to the brand new faculty facility has been overwhelmingly optimistic. “The primary phrase that everybody says is gorgeous,” Murtha says. “It’s a phenomenal faculty.”
The college’s fashionable, trendy studying environments give college students a way of pleasure and self-worth whereas altering their outlook on coming to high school.
“We’ve surveyed our college students during the last 12 months, and what we’ve heard is: ‘I like my faculty. I prefer it when my mother and father come to my faculty,’” Murtha says. “After I inform our older college students, ‘We spent $60 million on you,’ they undoubtedly really feel essential.”
Not solely is the brand new constructing engaging, however it’s extremely practical as properly. Lecturers like having the ability to configure the furnishings simply to help totally different groupings and actions. The sensory room helps put together college students to study who’re anxious or who’ve bother focusing.
“We had been very intentional with our design,” Murtha says.
Working with College Specialty on the design of the brand new faculty’s studying areas has been “a dream,” she provides, noting: “They’re simply so fantastic. The true testomony of any relationship is what you do when there’s battle. We had some objects on again order, issues that College Specialty couldn’t management, they usually had been unimaginable in working to make sure that we opened on time and inside funds. They bent over backward to assist us discover the fitting furnishings.”
She concludes: “I might advocate them to anybody.”