The reenvisioned Minnie Howard Campus of Alexandria City High School brings to life Alexandria City Public Schools’ goal of equity and a much better student experience across its Connected High School Network, which offers a wide range of programs for the city’s nearly 5,000 high school students. The Minnie Howard building – an extra site near the high school’s main King Street Campus down the street – provides new, high-quality learning spaces for 1,600 students from across the network as they move between the campuses throughout the school day, allowing ACHS to give all of them access to Minnie Howards innovative programs, courses, and activities.
The new building takes the place of a former elementary school that had been turned into the high school’s ninth-grade academy. It includes new academies for every grade level that offer a lively, mixed-subject combination of classroom, resource, extended learning, and teacher-collaboration space in “academic neighborhoods” on each floor of the building. Central to the design is the Creative Commons-an open space that rises through every floor and reflects the school’s focus on more hands-on, active learning.
The Creative Commons changes the usual, institutional-style cafeteria, which would normally take up one large space on a single floor, into a series of dining areas spread across all five floors of the building. Offering a much better, more student friendly atmosphere for eating and socializing at lunch, these spaces also serve as extensions of the nearby arts, science, and Career and Technical Education labs during the rest of the school day. The design also does away with the usual centrally located counseling offices; instead, counselors have space on each floor of the Creative Commons to help improve student well-being with easier-to-reach locations.
The community plays an important role in the new campus as well. The Teen Wellness Center, a state funded organization run by the Alexandria Health department, has an outpost here, as well as a city-run Family Resource Center operated by the Department of Community and Human Services. These two services, plus a 100-student early childhood center that offers a Head Start program, are meant to serve and enhance the resilience of the larger Alexandria community. The campus is also designed to welcome community use of its aquatic center, gym facilities, and fields after hours when operated by the Department of Recreation, Parks, and Community Activities.
To boost the success of these goals, the new school provides a sustainable, high-performance learning environment that offers enhanced daylight, thermal comfort, acoustics, and indoor air quality. Celebrating Alexandria’s Green Building Policy, the building is designed to target Net Zero Energy; to reach that mark, the design team established an aggressive “energy budget” for the campus, starting with orienting the building to get the most advantage of the sun’s natural light but also protecting indoor spaces from heat gain and glare. Shading systems on the building’s exterior incorporate photovoltaic arrays as awnings, and the site’s existing, renewable-energy geothermal system was greatly expanded to reduce the demand on mechanical heating and cooling.
