Skip to main content
Add as a preferred source on Google

Englewood STEM High School Debuts After Four School Closures

  • By Yvonne Marquez
  • 09/03/19

Englewood STEM High School in Chicago is open this week after the district closed down four high schools due to lack of academic achievement and under enrollment of students. Over the past decade the schools — Hope, Harper, TEAM and Robeson — experienced a 70%-85% declines in student enrollment, reported the Chicago Tribune.

The $85 million neighborhood school is brightly lit, with lots of windows and features colorful murals and inspirational words on the walls that integrates STEM symbols with traditional West African art patterns.

The new three-story building was built on the grounds of the former Robeson campus which closed in 2018. More than 400 students are registered to start the school year and nearly all students are African American. In addition, 88% of students are low-income and 22% are “diverse learners,” meaning they have different learning needs.

The $85 million neighborhood school is brightly lit, with lots of windows and features colorful murals and inspirational words on the walls that integrates STEM symbols with traditional West African art patterns.  

“One of the things that we were really adamant about was the power of images, and how images play in how people see themselves,” Principal Conrad Timbers-Ausar told the Chicago Sun-Times. “There’s some images that we wanted to have as students and families come to the school that they can see themselves doing different things throughout the building.”

Englewood STEM, which is the first new school to be built since the 1970s in the neighborhood, has an on-site health clinic on the first floor that’s open to students, staff and the community. Chicago Public Schools calls the classrooms in the high school as “world-class multipurpose educational spaces” where students will focus on science, technology, engineering and math. The gym/auditorium seats about 800 and the grounds feature an athletic facility with a baseball diamond and football field.

The school’s mascot is the panthers, which was chosen by community vote and inspired by the blockbuster film “Black Panther.”

About the Author

Yvonne Marquez is senior editor of Spaces4Learning. She can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • Florida District Completes Construction on New Leadership Institute

    Pinellas County Schools near Tampa, Fla., recently announced that construction is complete on the new Dr. Michael A. Grego Leadership Institute, according to a news release. The district partnered with Rowe Architects for the project’s design and with Skanska for construction services.

  • Designing for Every Mind

    Learning environments have the power to shape not just what students know, but who they become. When a school is designed with genuine empathy—for the full range of ways students think, sense, and engage with the world—it becomes more than a building. It becomes a catalyst for growth, confidence, and belonging. That is the animating idea behind neurodiverse design, and it is one that is transforming how more architects and designers are thinking about school design.

  • Architectural Power for the Modern Campus Landscape

    For generations, an outdoor classroom only required a textbook and a patch of grass. Today, not only has the laptop replaced the printed pages, the rise of agile learning has turned campuses into study halls with students listening to lectures and researching topics from quads, gardens, and plazas. The challenge for architects and facility managers is to provide connectivity without cluttering the landscape with visual eyesores or creating safety hazards with extension cords.

  • Moline-Coal Valley School District to Consolidate Two Schools into New Facility

    The Moline-Coal Valley School District in Moline, Ill., recently broke ground on a new elementary school that will consolidate the students and staff from two existing schools, according to local news. Robert Ontiveros Elementary School will serve as the new home for Lincoln-Irving Elementary School and Willard Elementary School.