Nashville Begins Construction on K–5 Charter School

Real estate solutions provider Ryan Companies recently announced that ground has been broken on a new 56,000-square-foot charter school near Nashville, Tenn. Rutherford Collegiate Prep (RCP) will be the fifth public charter school in the region from the local nonprofit organization Noble Education Initiative (NEI). The school will have the capacity for 470 students in grades K–5, according to a news release.

“We are proud to embark on our third charter school project in the Nashville community in partnership with NEI,” said Ryan Companies’ Vice President of Real Estate Development, Max Bosso. “As one of the top builders of charter schools in the Southeast, Ryan looks forward to applying our expertise to deliver a next-generation educational environment that enables teachers to instruct effectively and students to learn without constraints.”

Ryan has previously partnered with NEI for a 93,400-square-foot expansion of the Nashville Collegiate Prep middle school building, which began construction earlier this year. It also built the Nashville Collegiate Prep K–5 building during summer 2021. The goal is to expand educational offerings to families in Rutherford County as the region’s population growth skyrockets.

According to the news release, the charter school will feature a collaborative teaching approach in which different grade levels will learn together in large, conjoined classrooms and flexible areas for group learning projects. Construction is scheduled for completion by July 2024.

About the Author

Matt Jones is senior editor of Spaces4Learning. He can be reached at [email protected].

Featured

  • University of Kansas Breaks Ground on Entrepreneurship Hub

    The University of Kansas in Lawrence, Kan., recently held a groundbreaking ceremony for the new KU Entrepreneurship Hub, according to university news. The Hub is part of the university’s School of Business and will include spaces for experiential learning and programming.

  • 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.

  • Surging Demand for Student Housing Fuels Major Campus Investment Opportunities

    University leaders throughout the U.S. are accelerating plans to modernize and expand student housing as enrollment stabilizes and demand for on-campus living rebounds. Recent data from the National Center for Education Statistics indicates that total postsecondary enrollment is projected to grow through the end of the decade, with undergraduate enrollment alone expected to increase by more than 8 percent by 2030.

  • abstract illustration of school gym

    How the Gymnasium Can Serve as a Model for Learning Space Design

    Multipurpose gyms work because flexibility was built into the brief from the start, not retrofitted later. The same logic applies to academic spaces.