By Cheneen R. Capon
The Ateneo de Davao University (AdDU) has inaugurated the construction of the one-hectare senior high school (SHS) campus near the grade school and high school campus in Matina, Davao City as it gears toward the full implementation of the K to 12 education system.
“We are ready to serve Mindanao,” AdDU SHS head Rikki Enriquez told EDGE Davao in an interview during the ground breaking ceremony of the first eco-school in Mindanao on August 26, 2015.
Envisioned to be the yardstick of SHS education not just in Davao City but the rest of Mindanao, the university’s senior high program will offer preparatory subjects for college.
The SHS offers program in Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics (STEM) which provides specialized subjects for pre-science, pre-computer, pre-engineering and architecture; Humanities and Social Sciences as pre-liberal arts subjects; and the Accountancy, Business and Managements (ABM) which offers pre-business and economics subjects.
Students of each program will be prepared with the use of world-class laboratories equipped with state-of-the-art machinery and laboratory equipment.
Enriquez said Ateneo will also be offering a technical vocation course on footwear design and production, the first of its kind in the whole country.
“We would like to strengthen the footwear industry of Davao and transform the city to be the next Marikina,” he said, adding that the campus will also house the first footwear laboratory in Mindanao.
Project prime architect Jim Palma said the one-hectare SHS campus is a one-hectare complex composed of three buildings with a total area of 26,000 square meters.
“The concept for SHS campus is to change the pedagogy of learning. We want the complex to be a classroom itself where students can learn ecology and culture,” he said.
Palma said the first building, which is the four-story Auxiliary Building, houses public areas like audio-visual rooms, faculty rooms, and the chapel.
The second building will be the Academic Building with seven floors.
“The top of the academic building will have the auditorium which has a 1,000 seating capacity, while the succeeding floors are classrooms amounting to 40 classrooms,” he said.
The Academic Building will also have the library located on its second floor, with a direct view of the student lounge located at the ground floor.
Laboratories for each program will be located at the third structure called the Knowledge Building.
“It houses all the laboratories needed for SHS. The shoe laboratory will be at the ground floor while science laboratories will be on the second and third floor,” Palma said.
He said the speech and music and arts laboratories will be located at the fourth floor. It will also have a roof garden amphitheater on its roof deck.
Palma said the campus will also harness rainwater for non-potable purposes.
It will also installed with photovoltaic solar panels that will help power its energy requirements as well as aerodynamic design to harness wind in order to cool the building.
AdDU general assistant to the president Jeremy S. Eliab said the new ecofriendly structures are in response to the call of Pope Francis in his new encyclical, Laudato Si, “which points to the urgency of our mission in a world that comes nearer and nearer to breaking apart, ultimately due to the compulsive consumption of people in a throwaway economy that fuels the ‘techno economic paradigm’ that compulsively abuses the environment, forgets the gentle graces of creation, contributes to climate change, and causes directly or indirectly the suffering of the marginalized and the excluded.”
Eliab said Ateneo is targeting up to 2,300 high school graduates both from private and public high schools in Davao City and the Davao Region to be welcomed into the new Senior High School by school year 2016-2017.
“By June 2018, this new facility will be opened to the third batch of Senior High School students,” he said.
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