Parramore plays its ACE card
The
Parramore community has an ACE up its sleeve.
Wednesday
students, parents and neighbors will get to see that ACE – the OCPS Academic
Center for Excellence. The school will open for the public to check it out
before classes begin.
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| OCPS ACE |
Beyond any
doubt, ACE is the most amazing school built during the last 50 years in Orange
County.
It’s
downright historic.
ACE is the
first public school in Parramore since the early 1972. The historically black
schools serving Parramore were closed as part of a court-ordered desegregation
plan. Parramore children were bused to schools in other communities.
Parramore is
probably the only neighborhood in Orlando that doesn’t have at least one public
school.
But that’s
now over with the opening of the OCPS Academic Center for Excellence, 701 W.
Livingston St.
The school
is just down the street from the school district’s main offices and in the
shadow of downtown Orlando’s office towers. The school was built at a cost of
$61 million – nearly triple the cost of other elementary schools that will open
this year.
This school
will educate children from pre-school age to the 8th grade.
Officials are expecting about 1,200 students.
ACE looks
radically different from most schools in the district. For example, it will
have an enclosed parking deck. Most schools have a parking lot.
The school
will be full of state of the art teaching technology in all the classrooms.
In addition,
it will include a Boys & Girls Club – perfect for after-school activities –
and a health clinic.
Orlando
hotel magnate Harris Rosen has promised college scholarships for all the
children who live in the school’s attendance zone.
The school
will be open to the public from 4 to 6 p.m. on Wednesday.
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