Murphy – The Learning Center charter school plans to add a second campus for the upcoming school year as its enrollment continues to soar.
The school announced July 23 that it would be moving seventh-, eighth- and ninth-grade students into a new campus on the bottom floor of the Mountain Vista Inn off Peachtree Street. The school is leasing the space, but eventually plans to purchase the entire building.
“Our enrollment just started mushrooming, and we also had been batting around the idea of beginning high school,” said The Learning Center’s founder and director of business and operations, Mary Jo Dyre. “We’ve been asked over the years to do that, and we’d just never done it. An early college seemed to be an answer for so long, and somehow we had hit upon the fact that this was just the right time.”
Including preschool, The Learning Center’s enrollment stands at 265 students.
Dyre said the school’s existing campus on Conaheeta Street has run out of space to grow much further, especially with the substantial increase in enrollment The Learning Center saw starting in March 2020.
“We’re renovating that, and then we’ll have to deal with the rest of it with more time and renewed energy after we get past this push to get our kids in the door,” Dyre said.
She said much of the heavy work on the building began Monday, with contractors going in and gutting the level.
“We can’t do anything until we go in and pull out some old stuff,” Dyre said. “We got delayed with the Dumpster one day, and it took all last week to have our various workers and contract employees look at it and make sure we had a strong plan in place.”
She also said that the grouping of seventh, eighth and ninth grades together was deliberate, saying those three years were among the most crucial for development and ensuring students were prepared for high school.
“They’re really not quite ready for high school, but yet they’re chomping at the bits in some ways, so if we could move that group up together – then another year 10th and another year 11th and 12th – all in the same environment, then you might have a ninth-grader whose ready to just soar,” Dyre said.
She said the school had chosen the Mountain Vista Inn building due to it being well built, as well as potential to develop it further to suit the school’s needs as growth continues.
“It took us a while to check the boxes off, and we really didn’t start dealing with the owners until end of June,” Dyre said. “I kept trying to find a place that worked a little bit better, and I kept coming back to this. We’re under an extreme timeline issue, but we’re notorious for being flexible. We’re planning on doing it.”