Reporting on a school under construction is a little like trying to describe a dream you had about a place that doesn’t exist yet.
On Thursday, Maricopa Unified School District leaders were given a tour through the future Alma Farrell Innovation Academy, a K-8 campus scheduled to open in July. While this reporter was invited to tag along, there was a catch: I wasn’t allowed to quote anyone or take any photos inside the building.
It’s counterintuitive for a journalist to say yes to such restrictions. Questions and images are kind of the foundation of what we do. The journalism outfit down the road said “no” to the same request. But when offered the chance to walk through the new school months before its opening, how could InMaricopa resist?
After a brief negotiation, I was allowed to record my own voice as I walked through the site, a sort of architectural field journal to describe steel beams, the sound of busy machinery and imagined classrooms.
What follows is part tour, part narration of being guided through a building that isn’t finished yet.
The main staircase had been poured the day before. The crowd slowly stepped onto the steel steps. The design is reminiscent of Desert Sunrise High School. That makes sense, because Chasse Building Team is the architect and construction company behind both. They were the ones leading the tour, helping paint a picture of classrooms-to-be.
Construction crews in neon vests moved past work lights illuminating what will eventually be kindergarten hallways. That day, the metal beams felt like the bones while the muscle was being built on top. HVAC units hung low from exposed ceilings. Somewhere behind a newly erected wall, machinery beeped insistently in reverse.
You had to imagine the classrooms right now. The skeletal outlines of metal studs mark future walls and the open rectangles where doors will be. In some places, entire sections of wall are missing by design. These large openings between classrooms are meant to allow team teaching and multi-grade collaboration under the district’s planned instructional model.
It’s hard to tell, in this new teaching model, what is half-built and what is intentionally left open. The Chasse team guides the MUSD administration’s imaginations.
A long gallery on the second floor passes above what will eventually become a courtyard. Harnessed crews stood on the roof, pausing their work briefly to watch the tour progress. Steel beams crisscrossed overhead. Staircases led up to other staircases that led to caution tape.
At one point I turned a corner and nearly walked into a boundary of red plastic strung between two cinder block columns. It’s the physical manifestation of “not yet.”
The whole place had the unsettled geometry of an M.C. Escher drawing: facades that appear complete from one angle but dissolve into scaffolding from another, stairways that stop abruptly in midair, windows opening onto rooms that don’t exist yet.
Workers maneuvered Skyjacks across cavernous rooms that echoed like gymnasiums. It will be a gymnasium. The small crowd gathered where the bleachers will eventually sit. Boxes sat next to pallets of tile that will someday be floors. Electrical conduit ran along beams in careful lines, waiting for walls to make sense of it all.
Elsewhere, single-stall restrooms, each enclosed from floor to ceiling, lined an open wash station area, part of a layout the district says is designed to improve visibility and supervision. Every bathroom will be installed with vape sensors and facial recognition cameras.
Outside, in what will become an indoor-outdoor amphitheater, a smoothing machine crawled across packed dirt.
District officials say the campus will eventually serve up to 1,200 students and feature flexible classroom “learning houses,” maker spaces and collaborative areas designed to accommodate team teaching across grade levels.
For now, though, it’s a maze that only those in hard hats can navigate. District leaders envision where kindergarteners will someday read independently in dedicated literacy spaces, but where today the loudest sound is a power lift cranking itself toward an unfinished ceiling.
Somewhere near the top of the stairs, still under construction, someone mentioned July’s ribbon cutting.
You could almost see it from there.
Here are the district’s photos:
One Response
“The design is reminiscent of Desert Sunrise High School.”
I guess that means we’re gonna be getting another boring ass school design. Truly amazing. I honestly don’t understand the point of the “Learning Stairs”. We have them in the student commons at DSHS, and they honestly serve no use. Can’t we go back to making schools like MHS or Santa Rosa? As in schools that actually look nice, rather than schools that look like some sort of ugly modern building that completely contrasts with its surroundings.