School Celebrates Grand Opening

The Bancroft School in Mount Laurel, N.J., celebrated its grand opening on Monday, December 18, 2017. The new campus provides a regional destination of hope where expanded and upgraded learning and living spaces are designed specifically to meet the needs of special education students and their families.

Dewberry, a privately held professional services firm, supported the school with selecting and then developing an appropriate site for the new 80-acre campus.

 Following site selection, Dewberry was responsible for full land development services, including survey; landscape architecture; and site/civil, geotechnical, environmental, and traffic engineering. The design actualizes Bancroft’s vision to provide opportunities for exploration and community interaction with outdoor walking paths of various scales; locations for play, including sports fields and playgrounds; and garden areas that focus on bringing nature into the everyday interaction of the children in the school. Dewberry studied how the school’s special needs students would use the space and designed secure areas that provide a safe environment without feeling constrained or confining. Hardscape and landscape materials and plantings were carefully selected to keep users safe.

Featured

  • Texas A&M Opens First Building at Fort Worth Campus, Breaks Ground on Research Facility

    The Texas A&M University System marked a major milestone in the development of its Fort Worth campus by opening its first completed academic building and breaking ground on a second facility designed to expand research and industry collaboration.

  • California High School Opens New Classroom Building for 7th-, 8th-Graders

    Santa Rosa City Schools in Santa Rosa, Calif., recently announced the completion of a new classroom building for Piner High School. As the campus transitions to a Junior/Senior High School, the facility will play home to the school’s new population of seventh- and eighth-grade students.

  • Opportunity by Design Framework

    Opportunity by Design

    Educational improvement efforts often focus on curriculum, instruction, assessment, professional development, and intervention systems while treating the physical school building as background. But school design is not a passive backdrop to learning — it is a structural lever for equity.

  • Missouri Child Development Center Completes $2.3M Expansion

    The Urban Sprouts Child Development Center in St. Louis, Mo., recently announced the completion of a $2.3-million expansion and adaptive reuse project, according to a news release. The new space includes a retail café, outdoor learning space, and a support office building.