Photo: The 24-classroom Riverdale听Early Learning Center will serve an estimated 500 students. | Photo Credit (all): PBK
By Lindsey Coulter听
Clayton County Public Schools will unveil a first-of-its-kind educational facility for Pre-K students at the start of the 2025-2026 school year. Designed by the nation鈥檚 largest K-12 architecture firm,听, the听Riverdale听Early Learning Center (Riverdale ELC) introduces new opportunities for young learners in the Atlanta metro area.听听听
Tailored to early learners,听Riverdale听ELC is designed to provide students with a safe and secure space that is accessible and functional, while also remaining playful. Offering听outdoor learning opportunities, the campus will include an accessible playground, amphitheater and four classroom clusters鈥攅ach focused on a different geographical region in Georgia.听In addition to a media center, STEM lab and rooms dedicated to art, music and play, Riverdale ELC will even offer wraparound services for community members such as vision and dental care, employment services and social services. This inclusive approach meant the PBK design team needed to carefully balance safety and security for students and educators without compromising a playful and nurturing environment.听
鈥淲e were approached by Clayton County Public Schools to help get their enrollment rates back up,鈥� said Bayleigh Kempainen, AIA, managing principal of PBK鈥檚 Sugar Hill, Ga. 鈥淭he district lost a lot of students during COVID, and they found that a lot of their students weren’t graduating.鈥�听
As research shows that early exposure to fun and engaging learning environments increases the odds that students will successfully matriculate from high school, Kempainen explained, the purpose of the early Learning Center was multi layered. The project aims to meet the county鈥檚 pre-kindergarten education needs while reengaging students that had fallen off the radar and increasing their long-term educational success. The 24-classroom facility will serve an estimated 500 students; however, the project won鈥檛 just focus on young learners
鈥淚t’s more than just a Pre-K center,鈥� Kempainen said. 鈥淚t also includes wrap-around community services.鈥�听
These services include a daycare center, health clinic, counseling services, observation rooms that allow parents to watch their children engage in play therapy sessions and more. However, with the additional focus on community engagement and creating a true community resource, safety and security for students specifically was key.
The PBK design team took a multi-pronged approach to security, creatively working safety considerations into the structure without making the campus feel like a fortress. This included an awareness of sightlines into learning areas, integrating security technology and durable door hardware, and building discrete layers of security around students, starting at the classroom level and moving outward to the six-classroom pod level. The team considered how individual pods could be locked down to prevent access, if necessary, but maintained a sense of the pods as being a sort of welcoming home base for students. 听
“[Safety] was one of the top priorities, but we also balanced it with our interiors, creating engaging spaces where students can use their imaginations, get outside and have fun at school,鈥� Kempainen said. 鈥淲e were very careful not to allow any access to the Pre-K center from inside the building. From the outside, it all looks like one campus, but on the inside there’s no path from one [area] to the other.鈥�听
Additionally, the building鈥檚 angles create interior playgrounds, which further helps to control access, and most windows are positioned to look into the interior play spaces rather than to the building鈥檚 exterior. These spaces are also directly viewable from the principal鈥檚 office and teacher work rooms for added monitoring.听
According to Kempainen, many of these safety and security tactics are client driven. 听
鈥淥ur responsibility as designers is to bring up the latest and greatest and trends that we see. That might be security detectors or double doors. We recommend these things听but ultimately, [the client is] going to tell us what sort of technologies they’d like us to use. I feel like as we progress in the safety and security world, it is all becoming more technologically advanced.鈥�听
Learn more about the project in the , which focuses on more safety and security topics and trends.听