Grow Together: Designing the Mt. Healthy Early Learning Center
Inventive. Forward-thinking. Visionary. Progressive. Impactful.
These adjectives cannot often be applied to a school district in which 99.7% of its students are economically disadvantaged.
Yet, this is precisely how SHP architect and design leader, John Noble, describes the Mt. Healthy City School District. The culturally inclusive school system’s theme of “growing together” revolves around responsiveness, instruction, and equitable practices—three priorities that come to life beautifully in the design of the Mt. Healthy Early Learning Center. The new, 40,000-square-foot campus for pre-school and kindergarten children opened in the fall of 2021.
The center realizes an important step forward in a years-long process to better prepare the community’s young learners, who were routinely underprepared for elementary school. It features an innovative prototype classroom spearheaded by SHP’s PK-12 Education Studio: a pair of classrooms with shared access to an atelier with convertible indoor and outdoor spaces that can flex to serve multiple educational, curricular and pedagogical purposes.
Learn more about this exciting project in our case study, Grow Together.