There’s a new teardown going on in Old Lake Highlands, but this time, it’s not a house. It’s St. John’s Episcopal School, which is demolishing its lower school building to replace it with a new, much larger one. The $6.5 million project will be underway during the next year, scheduled for completion by the fall 2004 semester.
Walter Sorensen, head of the school, says they’ve had a “drastic need” for the new building for years. “Our lower school classes have been scattered in different buildings throughout the school,” he says. “We even have some classes in the undercroft of the chapel. With the new facility, they will all be together.”
The new building will be approximately four times the size of its predecessor, increasing the school’s square footage by more than 30,000. But the school won’t add any more students to its enrollment.
Why not?
“Some neighbors had major concerns at the beginning,” says Carol Graham,
St. John’s director of development. “We’ve sort of had a gentlemen’s agreement with them for years that we wouldn’t have more than 500 students, and they thought new construction would increase enrollment.”
Instead, she says, the project offers greater assurance that won’t happen.
“We have it in writing under the building permit that we will never increase enrollment” she says. “Once they realized that, they were OK.”
The school also worked to be a good neighbor in other ways during the planning process.
“There were a number of erroneous things going around in the neighborhood at first,” Sorensen says. “Some thought we were adding a high school, that we were cutting down 30 trees, that we were constructing this monstrosity. We assured them that that’s not the case, and I think they were all satisfied.”
But if they’re not making room for expansion, why tear anything down? One reason is to have larger classrooms, which in the old building are too small, Sorensen says. And despite the project’s hefty price tag, the school believes it’s less expensive to build a new building than keep the old one.
“The old facility was a money pit,” Graham says. “It was no longer repairable, and we couldn’t keep putting money into the building any longer.”
Because construction will be underway during the upcoming school year, St. John’s is converting sections of the library and other areas into temporary classrooms and moving some grades to different locations altogether.
“ “Everyone will have to give a little bit during the construction phase, but the teachers have been looking forward to this for such a long time, they don’t mind a bit,” Graham says.
Parents can expect some procedural adjustments during the next school year, such as dropping kids off at a separate location to avoid traffic flow into the school. They also can expect to hear from the school’s development team about helping pay for it all.
Though St. John’s has secured a construction loan for the project, it is attempting to raise $6.9 million to fund the improvements. Graham says they’re on schedule with their fundraising efforts, with commitments and receipts totaling about a third of the goal. Roughly $1 million of that has come from foundations, with the remainder being donations and pledges from alumni, church members and parents.
