A School Exclusively for Ninth Graders

The exterior of the Pioneer Ridge Freshman Center is a combination of metal, brick, precast concrete, and glass. It was designed to be colorful and tie in architecturally with the adjacent Chaska Senior High School.

School district officials in Chaska, Minn., were not ready to have a third middle school, nor were they ready to build an addition onto the high school, so they opted to build a school just for ninth graders.

The 124,000-square-foot Pioneer Ridge Freshman Center not only frees up space in the two existing middle schools, but also in the adjacent high school. And it creates a specialized, small environment for freshman to come together from the two middle schools for just one year before they embark on their high school journeys.

Built at a cost of $15.9 million, including the land, the two-story building can be converted into a middle school, but, according to Principal Designer Mohammed Lawal of KKE Architects, it’s been pretty successful since its September 2002 opening, so officials may not want to change the concept.

Additionally, said Lawal, "because it is a ninth grade center, one of the things we wanted to do is make it a very memorable experience, for just one year."

The school serves 600 freshman divided into four teams of 150 students each. Aside from the 16 classrooms, which average 850 square feet each, there are exploratory classrooms including industrial art, music, and family and consumer sciences.

"The educational planning is designed to foster the sense of a smaller school," said Lawal. "There are four classrooms on a floor." The center is also intended to better prepare students for the rigor and challenge of high school.

The commons is a two-story area that serves as a gathering place and a cafeteria. Color is used here on some metal panels and the glass framing. The exterior of this portion of the center incorporates red brick.

The freshman center is sited on the same campus as the district’s only high school. Architect Lawal explained how the 27-acre site itself presented one of the biggest challenges.

"The site was odd shaped-long and narrow. It had a 10 foot to 12 foot grade change right across the middle of the site," said Lawal. To compensate, the building is tightly curved up into the wedge of the site. Architects positioned it right along the cliff. There is also a large wetland on the east side of the site.

The building contains an abundance of windows, and color was a significant part of the design. Blocks of color are used to identify different areas within the school. The exterior is also colorful, clad in deep blues and green.

Other exterior materials include the use of red brick, metal panels, precast concrete, and a two-story glass wall that frames the cafeteria/commons.

"We kept it pretty simple on the inside, material wise," said Lawal. Linoleum was installed on the floors, acoustic panel clouds hang in the ceiling, some colored metal panels are used in the cafeteria area, and a burnish block indicates bathroom locations.

There are only approximately 169 freshman centers in the United States.

This one was the first of its kind designed by KKE Architects. The concept behind some freshman centers is to give more attention to that group of students, which in some communities, has a high dropout rate.