Corvian Community High School

Location

Charlotte, NC

Market Sectors

  • Commercial
  • Institutional

Sub Sectors

  • Academic/Education - Charter School
  • Academic/Education - K-12 School
  • Athletic/Sports
  • Campus
  • Infrastructure - Building/Site Utilities
  • Laboratory-Technology
  • Laboratory - Bio/Pharma
  • Parking - Surface
  • Workplace/Office

Client

Corvian Community School

Partners

  • Cushman & Wakefield
  • KSQ Design

Beating the bell to expand a private charter school’s campus with the addition of a brand-new high school facility just in time for the school year

Established in Charlotte in 2010, Corvian Community School was founded to fill a gap in the educational system and better reach children by providing an innovative, private educational experience that melds the arts, health, and wellness, among other offerings. Just eight years after its founding, the school added a new 70,0000-square-foot state-of-the-art high school on its 10-acre campus, furthering its ability to impact and positively grow students’ minds in the community.

Powerful
Partnership
70,000
Square Feet
13-month
Construction Schedule
Innovation & Science
Labs
Regulation-size
Gymnasium
Award-winning
Project
An incredibly unique element of the Corvian story is the team behind the scenes. The client, project management, real estate brokerage, design, construction, furniture, general counsel, financing oversight, and underwriting firms were all led by local offices and teams, several of which were brought back to complete the athletic complex project and the new elementary school campus.
The new build high school includes 16 classrooms, innovation labs, a yoga and dance studio, a fitness room, a black-box theatre, and art and music rooms, among other learning and collaborative spaces.
Corvian had a tight construction schedule, and the first day of school was only 13 months away. Working as a team enabled us to meet this monumental goal.
Student innovation and discovery are fostered with labs for robotics, 3D printing, chemistry, and biology.
The school’s regulation-size gym has bleacher seating for 300 people and capacity for 1,000.
The Corvian Community School High School was honored as a Finalist for Top Public/Civic/Education Project in the Charlotte Business Journal’s Heavy Hitters Awards.

A space designed for the next generation of students

The 16-classroom high school represents a new model for learning, with unique amenities including a black-box theatre, innovation lab/maker space, art studio with kiln, open concept learning seminar spaces, amphitheater-style grand stair, collaborative media space, and open ceilings throughout. These non-traditional amenities are part of Corvian’s mission to develop the whole child by addressing the needs of each student.

An advanced science wing for STEM learning

STEM was a large focus when designing Corvian’s curriculum, and as a result, one of the school’s most unique elements is its 2,000-square-foot science wing. Home to both Chemistry and Biology courses, the specialty science lab is equipped with mobile acid storage cabinets, phenolic resin pegboards for drying test tubes and beakers, a fume hood, lab faucets, refrigerators, lab workstations with arm support stands for experiments, acid neutralization cartridges, and recessed emergency safety stations.

Bringing institutional construction experience

The Corvian project team had one major non-negotiable task: completing the school in time for the school year. The team used their extensive institutional construction experience and expertise to design a schedule around this task, accounting for nuances including specialty material lead time, equipment procurement and installation, and safety challenges of building on an occupied campus adjacent to the existing middle school. Despite these challenges, construction was completed in just 13 months, allowing students to begin school in the Fall.

Side Story

The Barringer Way

Milestone celebrations from start to finish

Corvian’s commitment to the community was evident throughout this project as the school engaged key stakeholders for every major project milestone. From the groundbreaking ceremony and the traditional topping-out celebration to the grand reveal at the ribbon cutting, school board members, local officials, parents, students, and teachers gathered at each to celebrate the progression of the school and, finally, its completion.

“The timeline —Corvian’s first day of school was August 27. We had a very tight timeline to build the high school; working as a team enabled us to meet this monumental goal. Corvian, Barringer and KSQ developed an outstanding partnership during the building process, which led to much success on the project.”

— Stacey Haskell, Executive Director, Corvian Community School