New Classrooms
To maintain its reputation at the forefront of secondary education in Philadelphia, The Prep must expand its physical plant to allow for continued academic growth. That expansion will permit for a decrease in the class census (the number of classrooms being utilized at any one time), the offering of more Advanced Placement Courses and, most importantly, a culling of The Prep’s average class size. As always one worries that with a larger facility the school might increase its enrollment. At nearly 1,000 students we are at our base capacity and as stated from the beginning of the campaign, The Prep does not foresee any increase in that regard.
What will these new classrooms look like? The underlying theme of this project is the tying together of the old and the new. The ‘new’ school, which opened in 1968, was designed with fire prevention in mind and so it features a great deal of concrete and brick. The new Academic Center will hearken back to the old Prep, which burned in 1966. The building will feature restored hard wood floors, molding and doors in all of its sixteen new classrooms and seminar rooms. These rooms will also feature laptop docking stations from which a teacher will have the ability to control new digital blackboards or project a PowerPoint presentation germane to their subject. New windows will be in tune with the building’s early 20th century architecture and they will provide a great deal of natural light to these spaces. With the construction of the Connecting Link, this project’s central theme will find its lynchpin.
