Renderings for a state-of-the-art early childhood education center were unveiled in northwest Detroit over the weekend. Construction for the $15 million development on the Marygrove College campus should break ground by spring 2020 and be completed by mid-2021.
Approximately 144 children ranging in ages from 0 to 5 years old will attend the 28,000-square-foot center, which will feature 12 classrooms, a library, and health therapy rooms. The Inkster-based Starfish Family Services will operate the early childhood education center.
Marlon Blackwell is principal of the Fayetteville, Arkansas-based Marlon Blackwell Architects, the architect for the project.
"The detail, scale, and presence of Marygrove within the community is remarkable," Blackwell says.
"The existing buildings provide a substance to the campus in which we seek to establish a condition of resonance between old and new, crafting an early childhood center with purpose that is uniquely attuned to the physical and cultural particulars of its context."
The center is part of a larger P-20, or "cradle-to-career" educational campus on the site of the soon-to-be closed Marygrove College.
Named the School at Marygrove and operated by the Detroit Public Schools Community District, the social justice-themed school will welcome its inaugural class of ninth-graders this fall. Its elementary school will begin welcoming kindergartners in the fall of 2021. Eventually, the school will serve approximately 1,000 K-12 students.
Crews are renovating Marygrove’s old Liberal Arts Building for classes this fall.
After nearly a century of Marygrove’s campus being located at the northern edge of the city’s Fitzgerald neighborhood, the college made an early summer announcement this year that it was closing its graduate programs after the fall 2019 semester, ceasing all operations.
Marygrove had already canceled all undergraduate programs nearly two years ago.
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