Students participating in the Students in Academically Gifted Education (SAGE) program within the North Kansas City School District must have an IQ of 128 and above. Ever since the program’s inception in 1974, it has given these academically gifted students a curriculum that further develops their already advanced skills. Because programming was previously held at varying locations, the district’s approximately 950 SAGE students had been participating in the SAGE program at designated schools — until now.

The Northland Innovation Campus — often referred to as the SAGE Center — in Gladstone, Mo., (a suburb of Kansas City, Mo.) provides a truly innovative space that helps foster the exceptional skills of all 950 SAGE students that come to the facility from 26 schools on a one-day-a-week rotation. The facility pushes the boundaries of education design and serves as a permanent home for the 12 students in third, fourth and fifth grades who participate in the Program for Exceptionally Gifted Students (PEGS) and who have an IQ of at least 140.

“The goal of the SAGE Center was to bring students together so that they could be supported with their like peers, allowing them to talk on the same level and be challenged on their high-achieving levels,” said Dr. Danelle Marsden, principal of gifted programs at the SAGE Center. “Each of the kids is unique and has special needs, so we wanted to foster their uniqueness and develop their individuality. Many students struggle with figuring out where they belong and who they are as individuals, so we want them to work in a student-centered environment specifically designed to meet their needs.”

The SAGE Center’s curriculum uses a STEM approach, emphasizing math and science in a technology-rich space that allows students to research and create, while also supporting the students’ emotional needs by emphasizing individualized learning as well as how to work with others. Because some students are afraid to fail, the program also encourages the idea that “failure is an option” and can in fact stand for something else entirely such as “first attempt in learning,” Marsden said.

That student-centered approach set the stage for the entire project, which ended up mimicking the planning of a contemporary office space more than a traditional educational space. The studio-esque design features very few walls and no specified classrooms in an effort to prepare students for the real world, with a multipurpose hall, learning stairs, studios, outdoor classrooms, video production rooms and lab spaces replacing the traditional school layout.

From Flintstones to Jetsons

The SAGE Center was an interior fit-out project that essentially takes up 3.5 floors of a five-story building originally built as a blank slate. It’s a collaboration of several parties, including the city of Gladstone, North Kansas City School District and Northwest Missouri State, which happens to occupy the top floor of the building.

The project was accomplished in two phases. Completed in August 2016, the first phase included the K-5 portion of the project, for which Chicago-based Perkins+Will served as the design architect, locally based Hoefer Wysocki Architects served as the architect of record and locally based McCownGordon Construction served as the general contractor. The second phase was completed last summer by Hoefer Wysocki, which essentially used the same principles from the K-5 portion and applied it to a middle school portion. All said and done, the K-5 program takes up the first two floors with the middle school taking up floors three and half of the fourth floor.

“The driver of the project was the superintendent of the school district who has since moved on, but at the time, he wanted to do something really innovative and create a space that pushed people out of their boundaries and beyond their preconceived ideas of classrooms and what school space should be for these kids to be more in line with the progressive program,” said Julie Michiels, AIA, senior project designer, associate principal for Perkins+Will. “He wanted to make sure it wasn’t just a replication of what they were already doing but looked at creating something that will really be flexible enough to last for generations to come.”

To accommodate this “school of the future,” Michiels said the design team came up with a Flintstones-to-Jetsons analogy at the get-go, essentially asking the client to rank the project’s innovativeness on a scale that went from a “Flintstones”-era traditional design to a “Jetsons”-era future-thinking design. “At the beginning, we asked them to plot where they were, and they were closer to the Flintstones,” Michiels said. “We kept using that as a measure throughout the project, asking them if we were getting closer to the Jetsons.”

In the end, even the Jetsons themselves would have been impressed with the innovations involved in the center. For instance, the school wanted an open design — more similar to that of a contemporary office — that broke away from the traditional walling off of students in designated classrooms. Even the teachers opted to do away with assigned desks in an effort to allow for more observation and idea sharing.

Michiels said that the teachers and staff were excited that the design would allow kids to be more self-directed because these particular students need access to spaces and tools that are unavailable in a traditional classroom. That includes space for flying drones, teaching students coding skills, a student-run green screen broadcast studio as well as a maker lab.

“It’s a very open-minded program,” Michiels said. “If teachers are giving instructions, they’re generally giving a framework to operate within, not necessarily saying that the students ‘have to do it’ this way, so we wanted the space to serve as a framework that could guide activities without being overly prescriptive about it.”

The Design

Two key design elements were flexibility and visual access. At SAGE, students only spend 5 percent of their time listening to lectures, while the rest of the time is split between doing project-based learning, collaborative group studies and independent studies — all of which require a wide range of learning environments. Wide stairwells create space for chance encounters, while an outdoor patio gives students the chance to learn in an open-air environment. Miniature grandstand seating, built-in nooks and flexible furniture only add to the flexibility.

The school also wanted to encourage curiosity in its students, so the design team used an open layout to create visual access for students to see what other students, older or younger, are doing as well as to see the trees and ravine outside, connecting them to nature. It also wanted the space itself to be a teaching tool, according to Michiels. “We wanted students to wonder what a material is or see something out the window that can be used in a science project,” she said. “We often questioned if we could frame things in a different way for the students that led us to creating a lot of flexibility and visual access.”

To read the entire article, check out the March/April issue of School Construction News.

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The Missouri Innovation Campus (MIC) in Lee’s Summit, Mo., isn’t just a building. It’s a program that’s changing the way students experience education and prepare themselves for the workplace.

The partnership between Lee’s Summit R-7 School District, Metropolitan Community College and the University of Central Missouri (UCM) brings together high school and college students into one space, housing the MIC program, Summit Technology Academy (STA) and University of Central Missouri-Lee’s Summit, an off-site campus for UCM.

Students can start the MIC program their junior year of high school by attending STA, a program that offers students dual-credit classes that prepare them for careers in engineering, computer science, healthcare and multimedia. During the time it takes students to complete high school, they will have earned an associate’s degree from Metropolitan Community College, interned at a local business and then can finish their four-year bachelor’s degree from UCM just two years after they graduate high school.

The MIC program also integrates students into the community by requiring them to complete three years of paid internships with companies based in the Greater Kansas City Metropolitan Area. Not only does this help alleviate the costs of education, but it also helps prepare students for the working world. In total, there are 500 metropolitan students in STA, 1,000 students in UCM and approximately 100 MIC students amongst them.

“The goal of the MIC is two-fold: to meet workforce demand for top technology-talented students and to eliminate massive college debt by reducing the time to degree completion,” said STA Principal Elaine Metcalf.

A new building for MIC was completed in time for the 2017-2018 school year. Before the new building was built, MIC was spread across two locations. Now, students have access to all the technologies they could want or dream up. In fact, the new campus was built with flexibility in mind to accommodate future technologies and curriculums.

“This building is designed to meet the needs of the Kansas City marketplace, and it’s always going to change,” said Kevin Greischar, AIA, principal for DLR Group. “As the marketplace and local industry evolve, so will this building. There are walls that are permanent, walls that are built for 10 years and ones that could come down tomorrow if need be.”

MIC held a grand-opening ceremony for its new home on Sept. 5. This debut date was also perfect timing to show off the new facility to attendees at the national EDspaces trade show, held in Kansas City, Mo., from Oct. 24-27, at which School Construction News was in attendance.

Problem Solving Is Key

From the outside, the 135,000-square-foot building features sleek aluminum sheathing and an industrial-style finish that matches the interior that is spread across two levels, featuring high ceilings and lots of windows to bring in natural light. The design was a collaboration between DLR Group as the architect of record and Gould Evans as design partner, with McCownGordon Construction serving as general contractor on the project. All three companies have offices in the Kansas City area.

The $30 million facility features 60 classrooms as well as shared spaces designed to welcome students from both STA and UCM as well as ones that are designated to specific programs: networking, engineering, medical, bio medical, graphics, hospitality and cybersecurity. Most of these spaces have moveable panels so that spaces can be combined or separated as needed. The furniture — most of which is on wheels — also encourages flexibility and movement.

“This building is probably the most specific we have been involved with, where the curriculum defined the physical space and adjacencies,” Greischar said. “The staff was already teaching in ways that a building like this would let them do but in a building that wasn’t designed for it. Instructors and learners will only flourish in this environment.”

The building was designed to have what Greischar called a “Main Street,” with neighborhoods that include a front and back porch that get a bit quieter as students make their way down the neighborhood corridor. Because the facility is designed to prepare students for the workforce, it really feels more like a Google- or Facebook-type tech office space than a college. The traditional high school environment is completely gone, with a more open concept so that classrooms are not closed off. Classrooms bleed into the hallways and vice versa allowing learning and teaching to occur everywhere.

“The real difference is that teachers give students a problem to solve, and then ask the students to solve it with the available tools,” Greischar said. “A big part of the educational experience at MIC involves collaboration and this idea that ‘you win as a team.’ The idea was to create an environment where students could go to solve problems instead of spaces where they could go to have their heads filled with lecture-style learning.”

Another aspect that Greischar said the design team had to consider was creating a space that encouraged a level of trust between parents and teachers that students could manage themselves and their own time, especially since some students at the school are only in high school and are working around college-age students. While the students typically work apart from one another, there are times when they work together, especially when MIC brings in a lecturer or other guest speaker.

One such space that truly deviates from the traditional high school setup is the upper-level lounge area with an outside terrace. It was originally conceived to be a library, but instead, it provides a place for students to plug-in and eat or chill out before starting their schoolwork.

“The new space promotes and facilitates very intentional ways to help students practice the professional skills that are needed to be successful in the workplace,” Metcalf said. “Also, the flexibility and openness of the design supports a changing curriculum of the next-generation workforce.”

To read the entire article, check out the November/December issue of School Construction News.

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