Project Progress: Northwest Classical Academy
In May 2024, Tim Olukanni, a rising senior at Georgia Gwinnett College, joined the Albion team as a marketing intern. Throughout his experience this summer, he has had the opportunity to work closely with the Albion business development and marketing team on a variety of tasks. However, having the chance to attend his first-ever site visit at NCA in Kennesaw, Georgia provided him with another experience he never expected.
Northwest Classical Academy is a public charter school open to all Georgia residents. The school has enrolled grades K-9 for the 2023-2024 school year and plans to continue to scale to a K-12 configuration as students advance. In 2023, Albion was awarded with this project alongside design partner Croft Architecture, for the development of a 16,500 square foot, two-story academic building addition, multipurpose room, office renovation, and interior gymnasium upgrades. Specifically, the two-story addition applies to the Upper School wing, which provides seven classrooms, two science classrooms, two science labs, four offices, and two storage areas. Along with the addition, NCA required an interior renovation of approximately 6,200 sq ft of interior space to convert the current media center into a multipurpose space to reconfigure the existing space to provide six offices and two storage areas. Albion also provided upgrades to the flooring and added a retractable divider and seating in the existing gymnasium.
“My first job site visit was an unforgettable experience that opened my eyes to the extensive efforts that are required in constructing a project,” said Olukanni. This particular project is a design-build for the Northwest Classical Academy, a local charter school. NCA marked my first-ever site visit, I had the pleasure of meeting and touring the site with Albion Superintendent, Kurt Erdmann. I found myself lucky that he was the first person I met on a field interaction. Kurt gave me a full breakdown of what has been going on throughout the project. While on tour, I learned what makes him so passionate about his work. This taught me that for him, this wasn’t just work. He shared a story about his childhood and about his yearning to work in construction. By sharing his story, this made me realize that he cares about his craft and that he does not wait for the clock to hit five so he can end his day of work.”
As of July 2024, Northwest Classical Academy is still under construction. For the last 20 years, our Albion team has made it our mission to provide dedicated service to each project. While working with NCA, we have been allowed to demonstrate this mission by learning the true passion of our partners, continuing to do the good for betterment of the project, and to love the beauty of these additions that we hope the NCA student faculty and staff will enjoy for years to come.