Greater Atlanta Christian School - Gwinnett County, Georgia
By: Jennifer Walker - Journey
The Greater Atlanta Christian School (GACS) was founded in 1968. Quonset huts, or lightweight fabricated structures of corrugated galvanized iron, were the first classroom buildings on the property. With only 150 students, the campus focused on offering a quality education despite its humble surroundings.
The school flourished in many ways, but most surprisingly was that its basketball program won the first of what would be many state championships the year after it opened.
Forty years later, GACS, whose current president is Dr. David Fincher, has become an institution both in size and service. Its campus sprawls over 75 acres with a student body of nearly 2,000 from K-4 through 12th grade. Students come from 15 different counties and 70 different zip codes in order to attend GACS. It has become the second largest private school in Georgia and has built a solid reputation as an excellent academic school with a strong spiritual focus and outstanding extracurricular program.
From the beginning, GACS wanted to keep its small feel while offering a range of opportunity to its students. This was achieved through separate buildings for kindergarten, elementary, junior high, and senior high.
“Those schools are small enough to allow teachers the privilege of knowing each student by their strengths and how they best learn,” said Jill Morris, director of community relations at GACS. “Yet the school as a whole is large enough to offer outstanding teachers, a wide range of academic and co-curricular choices, and exceptional facilities.”
Through the years, the school has added amenities to its campus, including a $7.5 million Freeman Aquatic Center and a $1.6 million Naik Athletic Center, both in 2007. Yet the school believed it needed to offer its students even more.
“We longed for a place to all gather together,” Morris said. “Because of the blessings in growth, we found it very difficult to ever meet together as an entire family of K-4 through 12th-grade students and our teachers.”
The school’s current auditorium only seats 600, and its Bradford Gymnasium only seats 1,200. Another blessing for the school is a generous Christian Life Fund that allows it to bring in Christian-based speakers and teachers, entertainers, and authors. However, there needed to be a larger place for these gatherings. Thus, the school began looking at adding a forum that would be large enough to accommodate the entire campus for concerts and special programs.
GACS turned to Lindsay, Pope, Brayfield & Associates, an architect firm in Atlanta, to design a large forum. The firm had designed two other campus buildings in the past: the elementary school and a ministry school building bridging the church and the school. The firm already was familiar with the traditional style of the school and its mission to keep its feel cozy. It also listened to the wishes of the school’s leadership.
“The main challenge for this facility was creating an atmosphere that is conducive for multiple uses,” Morris explained. “During the week, we will use it for chapels, so we wanted a worship atmosphere. In the afternoon or evening, we may have a basketball or volleyball game and wanted a school spirit atmosphere. In addition, it may be used for speakers, concerts, and community events or banquets, so it needed to be designed to accommodate each function and minimize the changeover timeframe.”
Furthermore, the school wanted the forum to have friendly pedestrian and gathering areas for students who were passing between the school buildings, media center, cafeteria, and other facilities on campus.
Situated in the middle of the large campus, the forum offered some design challenges. It needed three main entrances, and each of those entrances, because of the lay of the land, needed to be on different levels, said architect Mike Clifford.
The exterior also was designed to comfortably fit into the campus with matching white windows and red bricking, as well as finishes such as synthetic stucco and cast stone. Inside, the forum was designed to accommodate its many uses. The forum has individual seating for 2,800 for sporting events and 3,500 for chapel, speakers, and concerts. All of the seats are retractable, which allows for 20,000 square feet of floor space. It also has drop-down curtains that can further divide the space for more intimate gatherings.
The $29-million, 80,000-square-foot structure is flanked with large video screens (two 13 feet high by 23 feet wide and one center screen measuring 22 feet by 30 feet), two studio-quality HD cameras, three remote cameras, and more than 50 each LED and robotic lights. The facility has a tour-grade sound system and will be set up to easily accommodate Christian groups. All systems will converge at a central managing station that will control everything from sound checks to light dimming to bleacher folding all in one central area.
Classrooms, a large editing room, and a studio were added to the facility so that broadcast classes could be offered to the students. Morris said the forum will be available first for school events and secondly for appropriate community events. The forum is named for Jesse Long, founder of the school, who had a vision to build a Christian school that would give the people of Georgia an education center that not only offered a Christian environment but also excellence in every other area from academics to sports.
“The Long Forum is a missing link for drawing our GACS community together, and with the addition of this facility, we hope to also reach out, in accordance to our mission, to our neighboring community,” said Dr. Fincher.
Lindsay, Pope, Brayfield & Associates, www.lpbatlanta.com, has consistently ranked among the top 25 AVE firms by the Atlanta Business Chronicle.
