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School's in for winter: New facility opens at Legacy Christian High School
By Elizabeth Knighten, eknighten@acnpapers.com
Students, staff and members of the city including Mayor Maher Maso and City Manager George Purefoy gathered to celebrate the opening of Legacy Christian Academy's new high school on Jan. 4.
Headmaster Chris Harmon said Legacy seniors who had been in the school since kindergarten were invited to cut the inaugural ribbon.
Harmon said the private school, which has been in Frisco for 13 years, has students from cities all over North Texas including Frisco, Prosper, Celina and Plano.
"About four years ago we went and visited several local private schools and see how their campuses were set up and we walked those campuses with our architect and our board," Harmon said, "that was just the dreaming stage or the visioning stage --what would this look like -- and then we went from there into the design phase, which took about a year."
He added that the ground-breaking ceremony was held in February of 2011.
"So this building took almost one year to complete," Harmon said. "The building built fast, but it was really a five year process ... it goes back to the vision of the schools, there's always been great vision here for the future and making sure we're ready for the future and for our kids."
Part of the vision for the schools includes three "phases" Harmon said: the gymnasium for varsity athletics, which has already been constructed; the high school building; and addition facilities including: a fine arts facility.
Another reason the school added a separate high school facility was due to the growth of the existing campus.
"The south campus was full ... and part of the vision of the school is that we would always have space so -- we didn't ever want to bring portables on the campus, we didn't ever want to be in a position to turn kids away because we didn't have space," Harmon said. "So part of this move was to make sure that we had space available."
The new facility also features the school's "one to one technology initiative."
"Every one of our students has a MacBook and we wanted to make sure they have MacBooks and that we have teachers ready to utilize this new technology," Harmon said. "We wanted to make sure we had the building designed that could academically handle the technology curriculum that we were using. So everything in this building is integrated through Wi-Fi, every classroom has multiple data points; every kid has a computer, so it's almost a multi-media building."
While the high school program mimics FISD's Bring Your Own Device, Harmon said the difference is students are not just encouraged to bring a laptop; they specifically have to own a MacBook.
"Basically, a student would not be able to function here without one," Harmon said. "It's the same platform ... what you can do on an iPad, is less than what I can do on a MacBook, which is different than what you can do on your Dell, so we have the same platform, every student is taught the same way. We have a system set up where our teachers can communicate with our students, they can transmit documents, they can transmit information, they can do eBooks ... so whatever they do, every kid has the same footing."
Harmon said the program actually began in the old facility.
"We knew that this would be a growing process so we started so that we could get all the kinks out," Harmon said.
The school also welcomed students back from the winter break with the first day of classes. Harmon said even with all of the new technology, there was no way to tell how it would run until "200 MacBooks fired-up," however, he added that everything was running smoothly on the first day.
For more information, got to www.legacyca.com/page.cfm?p=1
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