Philadelphia School District Northeast Community Propel Academy

The Northeast Community Propel Academy features arrangements that consolidate clusters of classrooms and collaborative zones around shared media and tech commons within each grade-level house. With a total of nine clusters (each containing two houses), grades can be organized vertically or horizontally. The number of classrooms can be adjusted as needed. The overall arrangement efficiently combines collaborative areas for small learning grouping adjacent to media and tech commons, promoting ease of collaboration and the ability to allow for directed break-out activities appropriate to grade-level needs.

The school has a S.T.E.A.M-driven curriculum, a combination of science and the arts. It includes laboratories for robotics, two art rooms — one of which has a pottery kiln — and three music rooms that serve as a place for music theory and vocals, a digital keyboard lab and instrumental music, all in addition to their regular classrooms.

The Northeast Community Propel Academy embraced principles guided by LEED for Schools and WELL Building Standards for Educational Facilities in many components of the school’s design. With its vibrant design, the new Propel Academy offers a next-gen learning space where students form one community.

The project moved swiftly through financing, design, and construction during the COVID-19 pandemic. COVID-19 presented challenges regarding safety and lead times. Still, the project team utilized collaborative processes like design-build trade contractors, shared “Big Room”, and stakeholder involvement to ensure everyone on site was safe and that work was re-sequenced to keep the project on track. This collaboration with the owner, design-build team, trades, stakeholders, and the community was key to the success of the project. It ultimately led to a facility that never compromised the SDP’s design standards and supported the SDP’s sustained growth.  

Through this innovative P3 approach, the Gilbane team was able to deliver the Northeast Community Propel Academy from financial close to substantial completion in just 16 months – enabling the SDP to open the doors to students for the 2021-2022 school year. The terms of the P3 financing and delivery model necessitated the project be entirely closed out financially, with complete closeout documentation turned over, by the transfer date to the SDP, just five weeks after the substantial completion date. To achieve this goal, Gilbane divided the contracts/bid packages to establish interim milestones for closeout according to the level of complexity of the packages. Subsequently, meetings were held amongst the closeout team members three times every week to track and assist with timely interim closeout. In doing this, the complete closeout for the project was accomplished in just five weeks.

By streamlining design-to-delivery, reducing financial risk, and engaging builders as partners early in the conversation, SDP managed its capital resources better and more quickly addressed the disparities in its system.

Project Overview

• Turnkey development that delivered a K-8 school for 1,600 students through a public-private partnership (P3) with the SDP
• Delivered the project from financial close to substantial completion in just 16 months, a process that traditionally takes SDP at least ten years
• Design-build-finance (DBF) model
• 43% Minority- and Women-Business Enterprise participation
• Team: Gilbane Development Company as the developer; Gilbane Building Company as the design-builder; and Stantec as the architect