The new Minnie Howard Campus of Alexandria City High School realizes Alexandria City Public Schools' vision of an improved student experience across its Connected High School Network, which provides a broad array of programs for the city's nearly 5,000 high school students. The Minnie Howard building – a secondary site near the high school's main King Street Campus down the road – delivers modern, high-quality learning spaces for 1,600 students from throughout the network as they travel between the campuses during the school day, enabling ACHS to grant all of them access to Minnie Howard's innovative programs, courses, and activities.
The new building replaces a former elementary school that had been converted into the high school's ninth-grade academy. It features new academies for every grade level that provide a vibrant, interdisciplinary combination of classroom, resource, extended learning, and teacher-collaboration space in "academic neighborhoods" on each floor. Central to the design is the Creative Commons – an open space that extends through every floor and embodies the school's emphasis on more hands-on, active learning.
The Creative Commons transforms the traditional, institutional-style cafeteria, which would ordinarily occupy one large space on a single floor, into a series of dining areas distributed across all five floors of the building. Providing a far more welcoming, student-friendly environment for eating and socializing at lunch, these spaces also function as extensions of the neighboring arts, science, and Career and Technical Education labs throughout the rest of the school day. The design also eliminates the conventional centrally located counseling offices; instead, counselors are stationed on each floor of the Creative Commons to support student well-being through more accessible locations.
The community plays a significant role in the new campus as well. The Teen Wellness Center, a state-funded organization operated by the Alexandria Health Department, has an outpost here, alongside a city-run Family Resource Center managed by the Department of Community and Human Services. These two services, together with a 100-student early childhood center that houses a Head Start program, are intended to serve and strengthen the resilience of the broader Alexandria community. The campus is also designed to accommodate community use of its aquatic center, gym facilities, and fields after hours when overseen by the Department of Recreation, Parks, and Community Activities.
To support the success of these objectives, the new school offers a sustainable, high-performance learning environment featuring enhanced daylight, thermal comfort, acoustics, and indoor air quality. Honoring Alexandria's Green Building Policy, the building is designed to achieve Net Zero Energy; to meet that benchmark, the design team established an ambitious "energy budget" for the campus, beginning with positioning the building to maximize the benefits of natural sunlight while also shielding indoor spaces from heat gain and glare. Exterior shading systems incorporate photovoltaic arrays as awnings, and the site's existing renewable-energy geothermal system was substantially expanded to reduce reliance on mechanical heating and cooling.