CHA embarks on major campus building project
by JAMES STURDIVANT
Chestnut Hill Academy plans to construct a new dining commons, field house and science building as part of a major capital campaign that officials hope will better accommodate a growing student population and add needed resources at the 143-year-old institution.
The project includes the demolition of the school's current dining hall, field house and gymnasium and construction of a new dining commons and athletic facility largely on the same footprint as the older structures. The school's Kline Science Building will also be demolished and a new center built on the opposite side of the school's main building, where a parking lot is currently located.
Plans presented at a CHCA development review committee meeting on Nov. 16 depict an ambitious project that nevertheless attempts to preserve the historic feel of the campus.
"It's not really radically changing how the campus feels, even though we're getting tremendously more square footage," CHA headmaster Frank Steel said last week in a sit-down interview with the Local.
The school has added 125 students in recent years, Steel said, bringing total enrollment at the K-12 school up to 569 and placing stress on facilities designed for smaller numbers.
"We could comfortably house 600 students with the new improvements, but there are no plans for big increases [in enrollment]," Steel added.
The first phase of building, slated to begin in the spring, involves demolition of the current dining hall -- built originally as a swimming pool -- and construction of a new, 10,000 sq. ft. dining commons by fall 2006. The new commons would accommodate more students, allow for flexibility in lunch scheduling and enable CHA "to host school, alumni, parent events in [a] new, attractive and enlarged space," according to an informational packet presented to the DRC.
The current main gymnasium, built in the 1970s, and the smaller and much older Woodward Gym will be replaced with a larger (68,000 sq. ft.) athletic facility that will allow for more simultaneous use, easing scheduling conflicts and allowing for more off-season practice for sports like football, school communications director John O'Neill said. Major new retaining and drainage work will accompany the construction, which lies near a point where the land drops off sharply going toward Springfield Avenue.
A new 13,000 sq. ft. science and technology center will be constructed on the opposite end of the main building from where it now stands, in what is now a parking area. Parking off of Willow Grove Avenue will be reconfigured, requiring a new curb cut and cutting off through-access to Springfield Avenue. The area where the science building now stands will become an open quad area between the main building and new field house.
In addition to providing space for a larger number of students, headmaster Frank Steel said that a new science facility will answer a growing need related to changes in curriculum.
"Education has moved to a different type of teaching where you need more space," he said. "Kids need more than rows of desks."
Group instruction and collaborative work are the watchwords of the day, Steel said, requiring larger classrooms and labs than are available in the current 1950's-era science building.
Plans also call for the enlarging of classrooms in the east wing of the school's main building. Built as a hotel in the mid-1800s, the interior of the second floor features a long central hallway with small rooms on either side. By moving the hallway over to one side, the school will be able to create much larger instruction spaces, O'Neill said.
The school hopes to have the field house occupied by 2008, and the science center open by fall 2009. The plans, which are the major component of a multi-year capital campaign, require city zoning approval and will be reviewed by the CHCA's land use planning and zoning committee at a public meeting Dec 2.
The main building's third floor, a residence hall in the days when CHA was a boarding school, was completely refurbished in 2002 in the first phase of the capital plan. The space housed Springside School students displaced during the building of that institution's new upper school last year, and is now the home of CHA's sixth, seventh and eighth graders.
