The Los Angeles Community College District (LACCD) held a groundbreaking ceremony last week for the new $40-million student services building at Los Angeles Mission College. The event, which was livestreamed on YouTube and Facebook on Thursday, April 15, was the first in-person event for LACCD since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic.
The University of Massachusetts Medical School, located in Worcester, Mass., unveiled the design this week for its new, $325-million therapeutics research and lab center. The New Education and Research Building, measuring in at 350,000 square feet, was designed by architecture firms ARC/Architectural Resources Cambridge and ZGF.
At the Hamilton County School Board meeting last week in Chattanooga, Tenn., the board donated an out-of-use school building for potential use as a partial-day construction school for high-school students.
Our single-story school building was built in the 1970s and has been added onto and modified many times over the years. When it came time to give it yet another overhaul last year, the goal was to create a modern, collaborative learning environment that supported group work, Socratic seminars, fishbowl meetings, and STEM learners. We simply couldn’t check off all of these boxes using our existing footprint, so we started looking at how we could modify the space
The Winifred School, part of Winifred Public Schools in Winifred, Mont., is set to receive a series of high-tech upgrades and renovations that would double the school’s original size. Upgrades to the K–12 school will include lab spaces, a woodworking area, an agricultural science space, a car repair space, and a full-size gym featuring an indoor track.
Construction on a new middle/high school has begun in the Denver Community School District in Denver, Colo. The new facility will relieve space and capacity issues at the district’s existing school buildings, as its elementary, middle, and high schools currently share a single campus.
This week, the West Virginia School Building Authority (SBA) approved just under $75 million in “Needs Grants” for school construction projects in seven counties. SBA members selected the recipients from a list of proposed projects in 30 counties totaling $248 million.
The Hermiston School District, located in Hermiston, Ore., celebrated the groundbreaking of two new elementary schools last week. One replacement facility and one new facility are both set to open in the Eastern Oregon district in 2022.
IP surveillance solutions provider VIVOTEK has released an update to its VAST 2 IP Video Management Software.
Among the three relief packages passed by Congress since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Vermont schools and the state’s Agency of Education have received a total of $566 million in federal funding. About $100 million has already been put toward reopening schools, retrofitting buildings for social distancing purposes, upgrading HVAC systems, and other ancillary expenses like hand sanitizer.
Rapid Dx Laboratory has announced a partnership with Concentric by Ginkgo to provide pooled COVID-19 testing to K–12 schools in both in-person and hybrid learning environments.
Officials in the Seminole County School District, headquartered in Donalsonville, Ga., recently announced a proposal to build a new, all-inclusive, PreK-through-12 school facility. They attribute the need for a new building to the age of current facilities and continuing repairs to buildings damaged by Hurricane Michael, among others.
Stevens Institute of Technology has announced that it intends to fill all of its electricity needs from local renewable energy sources by October 2021.
George Mason University, located in Fairfax, Va., recently saw the installation of a new, 2.5-million-gallon water tank.
The University of Maryland is a strategic partner of the Techport @ The Airport, a business incubator designed to encourage transfer of technologies developed by the military into the commercial sector. The Incubator provides opportunities for students to gain real world experience and supports programs of the University’s Division of Research and James Clark School of Engineering.
A new global education recovery tracker project developed by Johns Hopkins University's eSchool+ Initiative, the World Bank and UNICEF reveals the progress of schools around the world in the fight against COVID-19.
An Illinois district has installed a $300,000 private LTE network to deliver internet connectivity to students. Collinsville Community Unit School District #10 worked with IT solutions provider STEPcg to address the needs of about 500 students in the area.
A cyberattack forced a Massachusetts school district to close for a day, just as kids were about to return to the classroom, and then revert to remote learning for most grades. Haverhill Public Schools made a public announcement when the district computer system was hit with a ransomware attack.
K-12 instruction is being delivered in many different permutations right now, and so families are making various choices for the education of their students. By mid-March 2021 more than three-quarters of fourth- and eighth-grade students (76%) were being offered the chance to attend public schools open at least some of the time for face-to-face lessons. But just a fraction of those students attended in-person instruction. The remaining 24% of grade 4 and grade 8 students were in schools that were only online.
Despite widespread perception that architects and designers are fearless innovators, many, in the author’s opinion, are quite resistant to change. When a product works reasonably well, building professionals tend to stick with it until strong evidence justifies a change.
A student cafeteria doesn’t have to feel like a student cafeteria. The new Student Dining Commons at Mount Holyoke College – a 1,000-seat, state of the art, anytime dining center created by Boston design firm Bergmeyer – is intended to offer an inviting, personal experience that evokes some of the school’s long tradition of intimate dining rooms. An important element of that effect is an unusual ceiling.