The North Kansas City Schools Early Education Center is home to nearly 1,000 early childhood learners. The design team was challenged to turn vacated strip mall retail space—a cavernous, dilapidated big-box store—into a colorful, welcoming, and child-friendly environment.
To break down the scale of the building and strengthen a sense of community, the design creates smaller, more intimate neighborhoods, or “pods,” each with a biophilic theme. Each neighborhood provides easy access to distributed resources for educators and students, to reduce transition time and recapture that time for learning.
Read more about the North Kansas City Schools Early Education Center and view a photo gallery at SchoolDesigns.com.
Mike Kennedy has been writing about education for American School & University since 1999. He also has reported on schools and other topics for The Chicago Tribune, The Kansas City Star, The Kansas City Times and City News Bureau of Chicago. He is a graduate of Michigan State University.
