New charter school soon to take shape
A new charter school in St. Cloud is on target to open this August.
Its enrollment period is under way and there will be a parent information meeting on Tuesday for people to learn more about Athlos Leadership Academy.
The tuition-free school last year announced its intention to open a school in St. Cloud and has engaged Minneapolis-based general contractor RJM Construction to build an 87,000-square-foot facility on a 13-acre site in south St. Cloud. Athlos Academy will start with a capacity of 800 students in grades K-6 and expand within three years to serve as many as 1,200 students in grades K-8.
“We had one parent meeting already but there has been a lot of interest, so we’re having a second one (Tuesday) and there’s another scheduled for February,” said Camille Wells, a spokesperson for Athlos Academies, which is based in Boise, Idaho. “We’re also in the process of hiring a school leader, who will be much like a principal, and we just opened our application pool for all of our staff positions.”
The parent information meetings are scheduled for 5:30 p.m. Tuesday and Feb. 9 at the St. Cloud Public Library.
Enrollment is open through Feb. 15, with a lottery to be held March 1 if demand exceeds the number of available spots.
Construction on the academy began in November and crews are wood-framing the classroom wings and doing the masonry for the athletic facilities, according to Mindy Bohumolski, a spokesperson for RJM Construction.
“We’re on target for an August 1st completion and there haven’t been too many issues,” Bohumolski said. “We’ve just been trying to stay ahead of winter, which wasn’t too bad until this week.”
Despite sub-zero wind chills, Bohumolski said crews also plan to begin roofing this week and should have the structure enclosed soon.
The St. Cloud Athlos Academy will be a single-story building with classrooms and indoor athletic facilities with both hardwood court and turf field space. The property also will have outdoor athletic fields for baseball, soccer, lacrosse and football as well as a playground.
Athlos Academies are “built on a foundation of academic and athletic accomplishments,” according to organizational materials. The campuses are “fitness-driven” and designed to “showcase the healthy-body, healthy-mind culture of the school.”
RJM Construction, which built an Athlos Academy in 2014 in Brooklyn Park, also released an artist’s rendering of the new school, which will be at 3701-33rd St. S — just a few blocks from where the St. Cloud school district had hoped to build a new Technical High School before a bonding referendum was defeated last November. Bohumolski said the St. Cloud academy will be similar to the one in Brooklyn Park.
Other Athlos Academy facilities are open or planned in Arizona, Louisiana, Texas and Utah. For more about the St. Cloud academy, visit www.athlosstcloud.org.
Athlos Academy will join a growing list of charter schools, independent public schools of choice that must be approved by the state, in the St. Cloud area. STRIDE Academy has been in operation since 2005 in St. Cloud. The St. Cloud Math and Science Academy opened in 2014 in Waite Park, and the Jane Goodall Environmental Sciences Academy opened in 2015 in Maple Lake.
