Last Tuesday, the Northeast Community Propel Academy, a K-8 school with the capacity for 1,660 students, opened In Philadelphia. The 180,000-sf building was financed and constructed through a public-private partnership between the School District of Philadelphia and Gilbane Development Company, which provided turnkey development for the new school.
Gilbane Building Company acted as the projectâs design-builder and hired Stantec as its architect. Gilbane was one of three firms that submitted bid proposals to the school district in the fall of 2017, and received the contract the following January, says Susan Tully, Senior Project Manager and Market Leader for Gilbaneâs K-12 Center of Excellence. The schoolâs design was completed by October 2019, and after some municipal delays construction began in March 2020, âon the day the world stoppedâ because of the coronavirus pandemic, quipped Tully.
Propel Academy is in a multicultural section of Philadelphia that âis booming,â says Tully, with lots of service sector workers. But the number of school seats hadnât kept pace with the communityâs growth; Tully notes that another school there, built for 600 students, now serves 2,000. The district âknew they need to get a new school built quickly,â she recalls.
The school is on land that previously had served as baseball and softball fields. As part of the P3 agreement, Gilbane Development purchased the land from the school district for $1, and upon completion of construction on August 19, 2021 sold the property and school back to the school district for $79 million.
âSpeed to market was a driverâ for the P3 arrangement, says Luis Vildostegui, Stantecâs Senior Principal and Education Leader, whom BD+C interviewed with Jennifer Grafton, Stantecâs Project Manager and Senior Associate. Vildostegui notes that Propel Academyâs design reflects the school districtâs gravitation toward a more socialized teaching model that focuses on learning with peers.
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SCHOOL FEATURES COLLABORATIVE ZONES
Gilbane and Stantec, with Fengate Asset Management, were part of a construction financing consortium that in June broke ground on six K-12 schools in Prince Georgeâs County, Md. This was the first P3 for schools in the nation, and itâs expected to cut in half the time it takes to complete those schools, which are scheduled to open in 2023.
In Philadelphia, the Propel Academy project âis one of the most collaborative Iâve worked on in my career,â says Tully. One of its advantages was Gilbaneâs relationship with Stantec, which provided architecture, interior design, and civil engineering services. âWe were able to advance the construction before the designs were completed, which fast-tracked the project,â says Grafton. And because Stantec had worked previously with the school district and Gilbane, âwe could act as an intermediaryâ when decisions were made, says Vildostegui.
Stantecâs office in Philadelphia is right across the street from the school districtâs, so it set up a big room where all of the projectâs stakeholders could meet conveniently. âWe were all there, resolving problems from the beginning,â says Vildostegui. Any additions or changes during the design or construction process had to be âcost-neutral solutions,â says Tully. (Nicole Ward, AIA, the school districtâs design manager, was its liaison on this project.)
Those discussions included âchallenging some basic assumptions,â says Vildostegui, like the buildingâs placement, which is adjacent to a park that exposures city kids to natural environments they might not see otherwise. During the permitting stage, the building team and school district also hashed out whether a retention basin on the site should be above or below ground (they ultimately chose the latter).
The building teamâs early collaboration allowed its members to react quicker when there were materials shortages or delays. âWe didnât need to make compromises,â says Tully.
The Propel Academy was build on land that once served as ball fields, and is located near a tree-lined park.
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A âSHINING SUCCESS STORYâ FOR P3s
Propel Academy is organized into clusters of classrooms and collaborative zones for small learning groups. There are six classrooms per grade for grades 1-5, and nine classrooms per grade for grades 6-8. The classrooms are positioned around shared media and tech commons within each grade level house, and the number of classrooms can be adjusted as needed.
The school also has science labs, music rooms, and âexplorationâ spaces, says Grafton. âItâs transformative,â says Vildostegui about the schoolâs design, that had to meet what Tully calls the school districtâs âstrict design standardsâ that are informed by LEED and WELL guidelines.
Tully sees Propel Academy as a âtest caseâ for the school district, and believes P3 financial agreements will be more in vogue for financing school construction to meet clientsâ demands for speed. âItâs a shining success storyâ for the P3 approach, adds Vildostegui. âItâs not for every project, but itâs quicker than a traditional design-bid-build because the issues get moved upfront.â
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