The Athenian School is undergoing a campus master planning process involving an architecture firm, the board of trustees, and a large contingent of Athenian community members.  This past Friday, students, faculty, alumni, parents, board members, staff, etc. sat down with the architects, a student-built model of the school, and a bunch of tracing paper to share their vision of the Athenian campus.

Here are a few of the many, many exciting ideas* that came out of the session:

• Interdisciplinary classroom pods
• Shifting the center of campus to integrate the Middle School by clustering more dual-use buildings around the Dase Center
• A subterranean classroom
• Bringing the creek that runs under the campus back up to the surface
• Yurts in the “Back 40” (the undeveloped 40 acres behind the main campus buildings)
• Designating a building as free space, to be left as a blank slate for students and classes to use for projects
• Opening up the Middle School into the current back faculty and bus parking lot
• Creating a shared building for the Maker’s, Science, and possibly Art disciplines
• There were a variety of ideas about altering the entrance to the school, from reversing the flow of traffic to creating a second entrance
• And much more!  If you have your own ideas about how to improve our campus, feel free to share them here in the comments section and we will pass them on to the committee.

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*Please note that at this stage, these are visionary ideas only.  Practicality, cost, etc. will be analyzed by the architects and board to determine the best campus master plan for Athenian’s foreseeable future.