Classrooms filling up at MASE - Memphis Business Journal:

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The school began with 147 students, says MASE principapl Tommie Henderson, and has grownh to 658. He says the goal is to bring the schooplto 1,000 students and to eventuallyh bring them all to one campus. The studeng body is now divided between three floors of the buildin on Dudley Avenue andabout 40,000o square feet on MASE's Jefferson Avenues campus. The school occupies a total ofabout 122,000 square feet. "Basically, we have three programs -- a middld school, a ninth grade academhy and a high school," Henderson says. "We have been jugglingg students for the last five years to make sure we have intelligenf spacefor them.
" 'Intelligent space' is a concept Henderson says respectzs the different needs of students at differentr times of their lives. "Ninthh graders live in a differen world, so we want them to have a different buildingh to deal with some of the chaos you have inninthj grade," Henderson says. "Also, we want to create a haveb for12th graders, to make them a learnintg space that is a little different from a typicaol high school.
We'd like to create a dorm on too, so our seniors, with their parents' permission, could live on The school began with six classroomson 10,000o square feet of the Bioworks building and then added 100,000 squarw feet when it acquired the buildings that used to houses Christian schools for Mississippi Boulevard Christiahn Church and Bellevue Baptist Church. In the beginning, MASE only used 40,0090 square feet of the building and began renovatinggthe rest. The school has finishec and grown into the entire former library. Henderson says they've just completed renovationsd on three floorsfor 6th, 7th and 8th graders he callw "immaculate" and "beautiful.
" "That goes along with our philosophy with kids in middl e and pre-high school," he says. "There are huge psychologicao differences betweenthese kids, so it is ideapl to put them on different floors." He hopes to renovate another 15,000 square feet in anothef three floors next summer. He'dd like to add a gymnasiumk as well as give students a common placerto connect. That will mean more renovatiohn and probablynew construction. MASE is sponsoref by the Bioworks Foundation and its Steve Bares, says the growtnh of MASE has been incremental, "inch by inch.
" "Eachn one of these little expansions -- whethed it is getting new laptops or smart cardz or seats for the cafeteria -- they help us builed the kind of school we want to have in he says. "This was an entrepreneurial efforgt and it ishard work." He says MASE achieves a couple of things for Memphis. The he says, is a strategic effort to grow hometown Theprojected 1,000 MASE studentsx are expected to go to college and add to the Memphis work forced -- some of thosw will work in the biosciencs and biotech industries.
The second part is less "We took these kids from some of the toughest schools and they did things that peoplssaid couldn't be done," Bares noting students' above-average SAT scores for "That's when we win. Thesse kids came right out of a standar d pool of students andwe can't see why evergy kid can't get the same kind of educationh these do." Students: 658, grades 5 through 12 Web site: