The final touches are being made on the expansion of Alexandria City High School’s Minnie Howard Campus.
After two years of construction, a certificate of occupancy was issued for the five-story, $174 million building last month. Alexandria City Public Schools is on track to welcome students to the new facility in August.
The final touches are being made to Alexandria City High School’s expansion of its Minnie Howard Campus.
The five-story, $174 million high school project is on-budget and on-track for “substantial completion this spring,” according to an Alexandria City Public School staff report that will be presented to the School Board on Thursday.
After years in development, a new agreement was released between Alexandria City Public Schools and the Alexandria Police Department to provide school resource officers (SROs) at the city’s high school and middle schools.
The new memorandum of understanding between ACPS and APD has been a long time coming. SROs were defunded by the City Council in last year’s budget, and Alexandria City Public Schools spent the first few months of the 2021-2022 school year without the officers in its high school and middle schools. The officers were returned after ACPS pleaded with Council for their return in the wake of multiple incidents with weapons in schools.
Alexandria City High School’s Minnie Howard Campus has been taken off of “secure the building” mode after a handgun was confiscated from a student.
ACHS Executive Principal Peter Balas notified parents of the incident in an email. A teacher reported the weapon to school administrators at around 9 a.m., and the building was placed in “secure the building” mode at 9:15 a.m.
(Updated at 5 p.m.) Police responded to “student altercations” today at Alexandria City High School’s Minnie Howard campus but the incidents did not result in a lockdown, the school’s principal wrote in an email to parents on Monday afternoon.
Three juveniles were arrested for obstruction of justice. No students went to the hospital or were reported injured, police said.
Alexandria City Public Schools (ACPS) has filed a special use permit to allow it to extend the use of trailers at Alexandria City High School to 2024.
The specific temporary trailers being discussed in the special use permit are those built specifically to accommodate students displaced by the Minnie Howard campus renovation.
The long-discussed and debated Minnie Howard project — part of adapting Alexandria City High School to handle ever-increasing capacity — finally broke ground yeterday.
City and school officials gathered at the site to mark the beginning of construction on a new Minnie Howard campus. The project is scheduled to be constructed around the current school and open in the 2024-2025 school year.
Alexandria voted in 2019 to stick with one high school across two campuses, but how exactly students get from one location to the other remains a topic of some consternation.
The City Council was supportive of plans for the Minnie Howard campus of Alexandria City High School presented at the meeting on Saturday — with the Council voting unanimously in favor and Mayor Justin Wilson calling it an example of positive collaboration in an occasionally fraught relationship. But getting students from Minnie Howard to the King Street campus and vice-versa is still a nagging cause for concern.
Three years after Alexandria’s School Board voted to stick with one high school, plans are headed to Alexandria’s City Council that could help shed light on what that one high school system looks like.
As a quick refresher: the Minnie Howard campus currently hosts 9th-grade classes but will be expanded to act as a larger satellite campus for Alexandria City High School with a total of 1,600 students.
Updated 1:15 p.m. — ACHS King Street Campus has returned to normal operating status and Alexandria Police have finished their sweep of the Minnie Howard campus.
12/10/21, 12:50 p.m. APD threat assessment completed & ACHS King St campus back to normal operating status & normal student schedule
Alexandria residents are being invited to weigh in Tuesday (August 10) on the design for the Alexandria City High School Minnie Howard campus.
The community will be provided a design update at 6 p.m. in a Zoom meeting with staff from the ACPS Office of Capital Programs, Planning and Design. The recently approved competition-sized swimming pool will also be discussed.
