For 26 years, students at ASTEC Charter Schools in Oklahoma City did their coursework inside a shopping mall, with no gymnasium of their own and no windows in many classrooms. This year, that changed. The school has moved its secondary students into a brand-new 157,000-square-foot building, leaving behind the former Shepherd Mall space that was never built with classrooms in mind.
As reported by News 9, ASTEC Charter Schools held classes in the former Shepherd Mall building for 26 years, a space designed for shopping center use rather than classrooms. During that time, the school dealt with ongoing HVAC problems and inadequate classroom space, and students had to travel to a nearby church just to take gym class, according to the station’s report. Founder and CEO Dr. Freda Deskin and her staff spent summers over those 26 years renovating the building themselves to make it work, per the same account.
Oklahoma City’s Journal Record documented the scope of the old setup back in 2013: ASTEC occupied 60,000 square feet of the 709,000-square-foot Shepherd Mall, supplementing that space with three portable classrooms outside the main building. The site lacked a gymnasium and auditorium altogether, and students were bused to a church every hour for recreation or soccer practice, the paper reported at the time.
A New Campus Built for Learning
The new secondary school now sits on ASTEC’s Deskin Campus, a 157,000-square-foot building with a large central atrium, middle school classrooms on one side and high school classrooms on the other, per the News 9 report. The Journal Record described the building as featuring modern classrooms, a FabLab/Maker Space for STEM projects, collaborative learning spaces, a gym and a performing arts center…