BY MATT LAMB
Staff Writer
Sandhills Community College is making headway on a new, ambitious construction project that stands to change how trade instruction is delivered in Moore County.
The Board of Trustees recently approved the LS3P architecture firm’s latest rendering for the college’s new workforce training facility. Conceptually fashioned as a U-shaped project with administrative facilities and classrooms on the periphery of two legs, the building includes five separate, trade-specific laboratories, all constructed around a central service yard.
The product of a $25 million earmark in the General Assembly’s 2023 biennial budget aimed at capital development costs related to the Moore Innovative High School, Sandhills’ pathway, thus far, has been circuitous. In 2024, project development for new campus construction began with a single, notionally L-shaped building on the back side of campus, between Dempsey Hall and the baseball field. The building was meant to house the county’s first “Cooperative Innovative High School.” The schools are a collaborative effort between local school districts and community colleges or universities.
By law, the institutions target a wide range of students: those at risk of dropping out of school before attaining a diploma, students whose parents did not continue education beyond high school, and students who would benefit from accelerated programming.
While innovative high schools differ in their offerings, they must enable students to obtain a high school diploma while beginning or completing an associate degree, receive vocational certificates or earn up to two years of college credit within five years. The schools are intentionally compact and capped at 100 students per grade level, all while “preparing students adequately for future learning in the workforce or in an institution of higher education.”
Spearheaded by Sen. Tom McInnis and Rep. Neal Jackson, the Moore Innovative High School is specifically aimed at local areas of occupational growth, coupled with high wages that require additional training for a burgeoning workforce.
While the innovative high school spawned the appropriation, the funding was exclusively SCC’s to put to work. In short order, the single L-shaped building was out, and a two-building solution took shape. New students would spend two years completing all their high school requirements in one building before being offered classes in a building owned and operated exclusively by the college, focused on vocational development.
As LS3P continued advanced planning to develop the programming needed for the new school, Sandhills made spaces for the inaugural innovative high school cohort on the second floor of Van Dusen Hall.
Last April, with the high school set to open in August, LS3P met with the trustees for a preliminary update, illustrating a series of questions the group set out to answer:
* What does the new high school’s educational programming entail?
* What new facilities are required to get the school running at full capacity?
* How can the community college leverage the new high school to accommodate growing needs on campus?
Katherine Peel, LS3P’s chief practice officer, presented both a preferred and an alternate concept, each with two buildings. She pitched a 45,000-square-foot high school building and just over 19,000 square feet for the workforce building — both single-story. The distinguishing characteristic between the two plans was the location of each building.
The preferred concept created a natural corridor with a thoroughfare running between the workforce and high school buildings, and flowing intentionally through the Joplin parking lot and up to Dempsey Hall. This concept, though, would have required relocating the volleyball court.
The alternative concept would shift both buildings eastward and offset from Demspey, alleviating the need to move the volleyball court.
Both concepts created a primary entryway for the workforce and high school buildings oriented northward and facing Dempsey, along with a covered and connected breezeway between the two and a courtyard that splits the difference.
Taking into consideration potential inflation through January 2027, the preferred concept came with a price tag of just under $40 million. Broken out, that includes $5.8 million for site costs — preparing the land for construction — $11.6 million for the workforce building, and $22.4 million for the high school.
On the other hand, the alternative concept comes in just under $38 million, with the only difference being a reduced site cost of $3.8 million.
At the time, the most likely course of action for the college was to build the workforce building first. Incoming innovative students had space in Van Dusen Hall for the foreseeable future.
Following a campus-wide realignment and facilities assessment, the trustees have now settled on a single building meant for workforce training.
The college has cleared nearly all of the second floor of Van Dusen for the Moore Innovative High School. Considering that those students will, for the most part, complete their traditional high school requirements in two years, Van Dusen will never need to house more than two cohorts of high-schoolers before they move out to the greater community college.
Now, the new workforce building will align with Demspey, creating a sense of campus connectivity. The college will manage to save both the Homer and Joplin parking lots, saving nearly $7,000 per parking space.
According to Peele, the U-shaped construction is very intentional. “Having this be a very visible project, the context, the scale and the proportions of the design really fit into the Sandhills campus, but one big thing is really trying to hide the clutter because a workforce training building, we’ve got welding, we’ve got construction, we’ve got HVAC, and there’s a lot of outdoor storage.
“There’s wood, there’s metal, and a lot of times the students are working outside, so we wanted to come up with a way, a floor plan that would really not have that so visible.”
Students will have exterior doors from each lab space that spill out into a courtyard, so the rest of the campus won’t see students working. Each of the five lab spaces will be between 3,000 and 4,000 square feet, including construction, HVAC, plumbing, electrical and advanced manufacturing and welding and machining, all while maintaining traditional administrative and classroom space.
LS3P’s Senior Project Manager Brian Tiede said his firm wanted the new facility to fit in with the rest of the campus.
“We were really hoping to kind of concentrate on how to make this building a showcase for the programs that are contained in it,” he said. “There’s a main entry that really pays honor to that Sandhills arch, and what we hope will be an opportunity for a logo and for some naming on the building.
“We’re really hoping that we can build up this grand entry space for a lot of excitement, some areas for student activity, congregation, student commons areas, as well as just a welcoming face to the building that really starts to knit this side of the campus together.”
According to Tiede, the design process is around a third of the way completed. As for cost, broken out by construction, bond insurance, design fees, fixtures, furniture and equipment, and potential escalation, the total project comes in at around $25 million.
Trustees Chair Larry Caddell lauded LS3P for its ongoing efforts. “It’s going to fit the campus; it’s going to look like it was always supposed to be there. (You) used the same brick used on Foundation (Hall), it will all just blend in with the arches, and it is still edgy, and that’s not always easy to do with the glass, and the big ceilings and big rooms.”
Contact Matt Lamb at (910) 693-2479 or mlamb@thepilot.com.
