Grand Forks School Board members tour imagined classrooms of tomorrow at Career Impact Academy site
May 24—GRAND FORKS — Striding along the dirt floor of an imaginary corridor, exposed steel trusses criss-crossing overhead, Shawn Senescall painted a picture of one of Grand Forks' classrooms of tomorrow.
To the left, where the dirt sloped into a shallow pit, would be the automotive services section: two stories, with a row of hydraulic lifts — four posts and two posts — and a line of garage doors on the far wall.
"We're trying to create a real shop experience for students," said Senescall, a project architect from JLG Architects.
Above the doors, where unfiltered sunlight shone through from the north, a row of windows would stretch to the ceiling. Sound baffles would be set up high to damper the din of heavy machinery — like the backhoe currently tearing up 43rd Street to the west.
Opposite the sprawling space, an architectural design and engineering lab; and farther down the corridor, marked on laminated signs stuck to red support beams on either side; a large equipment lab; a robotics classroom; an aviation lab; a virtual reality lab.
Grand Forks Public Schools administrators, School Board members and district teachers on Wednesday toured the site of the new Career Impact Academy, the 55,000-square-foot, $30.9 million facility that will train area students for careers in high-demand fields.
The metal-and-glass structure expected to open for classes next spring in the lot at the corner of Gateway Drive and North 43rd Street is supposed to look as little like a school as possible, said Eric Ripley, executive director of career and technical education and technology.
Ripley said that was one of many suggestions put forth by students in a fall 2021 survey.
That meant substituting red brick for interlocking, insulated and brightly-colored metal panels, and an emphasis on natural light in contrast to more traditional buildings.
Some student requests, like a slide from the second floor, did not make the cut.
The building will be laid out along one long hallway, with a sunlit, two-story atrium built around a staircase as its center core.
Standing in the clearing where the atrium was set to materialize, Senescall said the building's layout is intended to streamline student traffic as they visit the building for two-hour, semester-long career and technical education courses.
"The intent was, 'let's make circulating through the school as easy as possible — the opposite of Red River (High School), maybe," Senescall quipped.
An entire wing of the second floor will be dedicated to courses in medical careers, the No. 1 field students expressed interest in seeing in the new facility.
"We wanted to make sure (the courses) lined up with regional workforce needs, and we wanted to make sure they lined up with post-secondary opportunities," Ripley said. "But we also want to make sure we have interest from the students, because they're all electives."
The medical careers wing does both. Dani Rowekamp, a district health science instructor, pointed out Valley Senior Living was currently starting out certified nursing assistants at $21 per hour.
The CNA lab space at the Career Impact Academy will include 16 beds, compared to the two she currently works with at Red River. (There's space for training emergency medical technicians and emergency medical responders as well.)
Right now, the district's medical careers programs currently enroll a little over 200 students between Red River and Grand Forks Central High School.
"We'll easily double the number of kids who are going to get opportunities," Rowekamp said.
