Last year, just 26 of the 1,100 seniors graduating from Indy’s public high schools were deemed qualified for admission to Purdue, an eminent research university surrounded by low-income communities with struggling schools. So the institution has committed to building a high school that will ready under-represented minorities and first-gen college students for places like Purdue. A long-abandoned battery factory will be reused, with help from LISC, to house the promising polytechnic.
The excerpt below is from:
Abandoned P.R. Mallory factory to get new life as Purdue high school
By Hayleigh Colombo, Indianapolis Business Journal
The long-abandoned P.R. Mallory factory on the east side of Indianapolis will get new life now that Purdue University has chosen to locate its new polytechnic high school at the facility.
Officials from the Indianapolis mayor's office, Purdue, and Indianapolis Public Schools announced Monday morning that the sprawling building on East Washington Street, which at its height in the 1960s employed 1,500 workers making dry cell batteries, will eventually serve students who hope to get an education focused on science, technology, engineering and math.
Applications to the school opened Monday. Space for 150 students will be available for the 2017-18 school year and a new freshman class is expected to be added each year, toward the goal of total school enrollment of 600. Students in IPS will have the first preference for spaces.
It's a transformational investment that Purdue will be making,” said Indianapolis Mayor Joe Hogsett. The building "has been abandoned for a long time. This is a disproportionally economically-disadvantaged area. We’ve been trying to invest and encourage as much investment as we can on the Near East side.
Purdue President Mitch Daniels said the university anticipates making a “seven-digit” investment in the building to renovate it and said he hopes to encourage Purdue graduates from across the city and state to help turn the abandoned, boarded-up building into an innovative space for student learning.
Daniels said the Purdue team looked at several spaces, including existing Purdue high schools, but he was “ultimately convinced” that putting in the work to renovate this one would be worth it. He said the curriculum of the high school will be patterned after Purdue’s own polytechnic institute.
“It’s project-based, hands on, team-based, team-taught, very multidisciplinary,” Daniels said. “That requires a different kind of space than conventional classrooms and blackboards." Continued[+]...