More than a set of walls

A new building off Cahaba Valley Road tells a story.

At its entrance are bricks with the names of 78 high school graduates and their parents. They never attended school in the building, but they, the first graduates of Westminster School at Oak Mountain, paved the way for it to open this fall.

Inside, a three-story atrium reminds all who enter that the space was created for both horizontal and vertical conversations.

Classroom tables sit on casters so they can be moved to accommodate testing the speed of Hot Wheels in physics class and other hands-on activities. Other rooms set up tables in a U shape for what the school calls “question and modeling” discussion-oriented teaching styles.

“This building says the parents and grandparents bought into what we are doing and allowed the architecture to shape the way we are learning,” Head of School Robbie Hinton said.

The arched windows and cathedral ceiling in the Harkness Room upstairs also point students upward, while an oval table creates a space for discussion of works such as Dante’s Inferno.

Teachers have their own study space in addition to their classroom to encourage them to continue their own study of subject matter, but no lounge so they can better engage with students. In fact, it was this relationship that the school’s junior class brought up when they met with Williams Blackstock Architects last year. 

“The pushback to the initial [proposal] was that they didn’t just want better conversations with one another, they wanted better conversations with teachers,” Hinton said. “That blew me away when they said that.”

After all, Hinton said Westminster alumni say the number one thing they miss about the school is their relationships with their teachers.

Westminster is part of a growing and stabilizing movement in classical Christian education across the country. These schools focus on liberal arts, teaching them to think and reason.

“We are not doing something new,” Head of Upper School James Daniels said. “If you look at hundreds of years going back into what cultivates the minds of students, this is what they were doing.”

Hinton said many colleges are excited about their students because the national movement has shown them that classically educated students are taught to write well and how to learn.

The school, now in its 16th year, began discussions with parents about the new building to supplement the school’s space in Oak Mountain Presbyterian Church, and plans for the building became public two years ago.

“Parents and grandparents saw it as something that will be here for generations,” Daniels said. “We had more than 200 families of various means and backgrounds invest what they could in the project.”

The church allowed the school to use its 19 acres on the opposite side of County Road 14 from its main campus. The building, land and a road expansion on County Road 14 totaled $6.5 million. The school plans to open soccer fields adjacent to the new building soon, and one day they hope to add a gym and a fine arts center.

This year Westminster is home to 205 students in grades seven to 12, and an additional 321 attend the lower school across the street.

Hinton said they plan to gradually grow the student body to 624 students by 2020 but that they want to limit each upper school grade to three sections of 16 students.

“You can’t remain anonymous here, you are going to be known,” Hinton said. “It feels like family, and that’s what our kids love — that people know them and know them well.”

To learn more about Westminster, visit westminsterknights.org.