Serving more than 1,000 students on two campuses, Caliber Schools is a charter organization whose mission is to shift the experience, expectation and outcomes for students in historically under served communities and provide them with a rigorous K-12 education so that they can enter a four year college without remediation.
Located on a four-acre site in Vallejo, their new school campus is designed to accommodate up to 800 K-8th grade students and support a curriculum distinguished by a longer school day, individualized learning plans, project-based learning, collaborative teaching, daily writing blocks, and coding/computational fluency. Working within a very limited budget, the design team opted for a two-story, tilt-up concrete structure designed around a central interior courtyard with two separate outdoor play areas for lower and upper grades. The first floor houses learning suites for grade K/1 and 2/3, administrative offices, a servery and multipurpose room. The second floor features upper grade suites, each comprising adjacent, acoustically-separate seminar rooms and breakout areas, both surrounded by open, flexible classroom space.
Strategic transparency and creative use of pattern, color, and vivid environmental graphics in the central courtyard — a community project between TEF, Caliber Schools and Project Color Corps — add dimension and texture to the simple building form while expressing the vibrancy of the school community within.
