Briarwood kicks off school year with campus renovations

Beginning in 2014, Briarwood Christian School set off to provide upgrades and additions to its south campus.

The south campus, which houses seventh through 12th grades, has been growing recently and was in need of additional class space.

“[The] school has grown pretty much every year,” said Superintendent Barrett Mosbacker, mentioning that the south campus alone sees about 900 students daily. “We needed more space anyway.” 

The projects, which the school funded through a capital improvements fee from parents, focuses on both the academic and athletic sides of the school. 

The first addition to the campus was a new building that now houses robotics labs, a choral chamber, science labs and a new library.

“We wanted to start with adding state-of-the-art science labs,” Mosbacker said. The labs feature self-contained work spaces for the students to use with projects. 

The classrooms in the new section of the school also have large flat-screen TVs with Apple TV connected so students and teachers can use their school-issued iPads in collaboration.

“We’re progressively moving away from [the SmartBoards],” Mosbacker said.

Toward the back of the building is the new library, which is an open space and is moving forward with technology as well.

“Most of our [library] collections are digital, too, but we have some print as well,” he said. “And since all of the students have iPads, they can always have access to the digital files.”

Downstairs, the campus has an updated choir room, which was previously housed in another building. This room was outfitted with additional mirrors to perfect choreography during practices and designed acoustically so as to not disturb nearby classrooms, which house the robotics labs.

“They engineer, design and manufacture everything in here,” Mosbacker said of the robotics labs. He added the school also uses two 3-D printers for class projects. 

Outside of the academic buildings, the campus has finished projects for traffic and safety such as expanding the parking, installing a pedestrian bridge and adding a large amount of sidewalks.

“There’s sidewalks everywhere now,” he said.

The sidewalks make it safer, since many students frequently walk through campus to access different areas, Mosbacker said. 

The sidewalks lead students all over the campus, including to the ball fields, eight new tennis courts and an artificial track surface around the football field that will be completed shortly. 

This coming summer, students and teachers can expect more renovations as the school works on upgrading its existing high school building, and eventually, Briarwood is looking to continue with upgrades throughout the campus. 

“The next phase will be a large super-field. That will be on an additional 40 acres behind the tennis courts,” said Mosbacker. “We’re very blessed [to be able to do this].”