CHATTANOOGA, TN (WDEF) -Great things are happening at Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy. They recently cut the ribbon on their new Student Activity Center. Let’s take a look inside in this week’s “What’s Right With Our Schools.”
Dr. Elaine Swafford is the CEO for Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy, Montessori Elementary at Highland Park
She says, “Dr. Elaine Swafford: Today, we spread over five or six blocks, and we occupy 166, a little over 166,000 square feet of this campus and so, we’ve been able to turn this campus into something that is really wonderful for our students. We have been dreaming of having this type of facility for a very long time as I’ve been mentioned earlier it was an old, dilapidated warehouse. And that we had to just do a demolition. So,we were able to build this from the ground up and you know it gives our soccer team an indoor space to play and run and learn how to play soccer in their own indoor space, as well as housing our robotics team up in the Mezzanine area.”
Cristol Kapp is the Robotics Coach at CGLA.
Kapp says, ” Gosh, this new facility is a game changer because now we can have all of our parts and equipment organized ant neat. And we have this bright open space to practice. And the girls actually have their fields set up so they can be designing and building and then move to the field and test. And then go back and redesign if needed. It just has changed the aspect of our team. We are so delighted to be in this space.”
Dr. Sue Anne Wells is the Founder of Chattanooga Girls Leadership Academy, Montessori Elementary at Highland Park.
She says, “This space if you haven’t heard, will house our STEAM programs. And that’s so exciting because our focus, our mission is STEAM. So, we now have a space for all of our programs.”
Dr Swafford concludes, “It allows our kids again and powers our kids to grow in different ways that they hadn’t had the opportunity to experience in the past here. And we also shared this space with the community. As I mentioned, we will rent the space out. It was built for 7V7 programs. And so therefore you can practice and play it 5V5 or 4V4. And so again it will be a multi-used facility. It’s pretty amazing when you walk in. You look at it. It looks great from the outside. It’s a beautiful building. But when you walk in into this well-lit open space, people wouldn’t realize that again. And as I said, it’s the only indoor soccer space of this kind in Chattanooga. So, we were lucky to be able to also to house robotics in the space. So it’s really going to be useful to our students.”
