East Aurora School District recently broke ground for an estimated $12 million student education hub that will offer a kitchen for teaching cooking skills, a sports lounge for video gaming, television production and music recording areas and more.
The Resilience Education Center is being built on the site of a former administrative office building for the district at 417 Fifth St. on the city’s East Side.
The two-story, 30,000-square-foot facility is designed to offer new learning opportunities for East Aurora students and at the same time provide emotional and social support through programs that interest young people, district officials said.
The education center, designed by the district’s architectural firm Cordogan Clark, will be primarily for secondary students to use during after-school hours. The plan is to have the facility ready to open in time for the 2023-24 school year.
Architectural renderings show an open area for performances and presentations, a full-service kitchen studio for teaching culinary arts, a sports lounge for video gaming and e-sports and separate studios for art, dance, television production and music recording.
East Aurora School District Superintendent Jennifer Norrell said the concept for the education hub came to mind in the summer of 2021 after the pandemic had been going on for almost a year and a half.
“We had to think differently to really make an impact on our kids’ emotional and social well-being,” Norrell said.
Approximately 74% of students in East Aurora chose remote learning for the entire 2020-21 academic year. Only in the fourth quarter did the district open schools by offering a hybrid program which ended up serving 26% percent of students.
“We did not have interactions but we were very much in tune to the research,” Norrell said of the impact the pandemic was having on students.
“We began to have access to research and simultaneously we were aware of research that addressed not only the impact of the pandemic but the disproportionate impact the pandemic had on ethnic and minority groups and socio-economic groups,” Norrell said.
“We acknowledged our children had more of a need for resilience because they were living parallel to the pandemic with everything that was going on with race relations in the country,” Norrell said.
The district’s administration had a “heightened sense of awareness,” the superintendent said, of issues students were facing.
“When we were getting ready to open our doors in August for the 2021-22 school year, we were heeding all of the research and warnings that our children were not returning to the classroom the same,” she said.
The primary focus for the new education hub initially was to provide counseling services for students but that concept evolved into providing much more for youth, according to officials.
“We began to delve into what is social wellness. For us, it is having kids put down their cellphones,” Norrell said. “For the past 10 years we have known cellphone use among youth has been a problem. But COVID exacerbated this problem tremendously.”
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On the one hand the district wanted children to step away from electronic devices and yet for a year-and-a-half students were left with electronic devices as their only form of communication during remote learning, she said.
“We envision the Resilience Education Center to serve all ages. However, during the weekday we want the facility to have a collegiate feel,” she said. “Students may decide to lay down a recording track and later have an appointment to see a health expert. It’s letting kids know this is all about living well.”
Linda Girardi is a freelance reporter for The Beacon-News.