"STEM is the most popular career pathway at the high school level," said Wanda Gonzalez-Crespo, interim assistant to the superintendent.
Gonzalez-Crespo and project designers from D'Huy Engineering Inc., headquartered in Bethlehem, and Stackhouse Bensinger Inc., Spring Township, presented plans for the facility Wednesday at a school board meeting.
Estimated at $71 million, the new STEM academy is to be funded using $55 million in federal Elementary and Secondary School Emergency Relief, or ESSER, funds, said project manager James Lynch of D'Huy.
The district was awarded $168 million in ESSER coronavirus aid packages.
Lynch said the $15 million balance is to come from capital improvement funds.
The school is to be built on the site of the now-demolished Reading Outlet Center, formerly Nolde and Horst knitting mill, between Douglass and Windsor streets and North Ninth and Moss streets. It is intended to accommodate 700 to 1,000 students, Gonzalez-Crespo said.
Plans call for a 145,000 square-foot building with four floors and a 72-space indoor parking garage as well as an 80-space surface lot that can be used by the general public outside school hours, said David Schrader, an engineer with Stackhouse Bensinger. Featured amenities include laboratory spaces throughout, large multi-purpose and creative-use areas and flexible furnishings, he said.
Instead of a cafeteria, Schrader said, the building is to have a commons area that also can be used as an auditorium or classroom.
"So it can be used for education, can be used for dining, can be used for performance," he said.
Schrader said the exterior of the building was designed with respect to the scale and context of the surrounding neighborhood of largely residential buildings and with a nod to the knitting mill formerly on the site. Architectural details derived from the mill and a prominent building on the northwest corner of Ninth and Douglass streets are to appear in stylized forms on the school's façade, he said.
The project is expected to be completed in 2025. The design and permitting phases should be finished by March 2023, he said. Site remediation, including removal of remnants of the factory complex demolished in 2018, should start in September. The bidding process is slated to start in early spring of next year with construction commencing late spring or early summer.
The district first revealed its plan for a new school at the Ninth and Windsor streets site in September 2021. At the time, Wayne Gehris, chief financial officer for the school district, said the district was not sure what kind of school would be built, but believed the area was a prime location for one.
"We had thrown around quite a few different ideas in preparation for this particular project," Gonzalez-Crespo said Wednesday. "There were conversations about an elementary campus, pre-K through eighth grade campus and then conversations about how we could potentially use this particular site to help ease some of the issues that are occurring up at Reading High School."
Currently about 3,500 students are enrolled in the high school.
Gonzalez-Crespo said the goal is to help alleviate some of the overcrowding while providing innovative and highly engaging educational programs with a focus on STEM career pathways.
That focus will set the planned building apart from the district's existing accelerated high school academies, City Line at 1700 City Line St. and Thomas Ford at 901 Margaret St.
A third accelerated academy at the Glenside campus is temporarily closed, Gonzalez-Crespo said.
The career pathways model already exists at the high school, she said, with study paths offered in arts and music, business, public service and health services.
The STEM pathway was chosen for the new facility due to the demonstrated interest of the students, Gonzalez-Crespo said.
©2022 the Reading Eagle (Reading, Pa.). Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
