Maranatha Christian Schools - San Diego, California
By: Jennifer Walker - Journey
Some would have thought it would be a daunting task – building a school in a newly formed community on a plot of land that was not yet accessible by road. But the leadership of Maranatha Chapel and Christian Schools had faith. A few years and a lot of work later, their dream was realized.
“It worked out beautifully,” said Dennis Frey, the school’s administrator, from the decorative campus of Maranatha Christian Schools in the Santa Fe Valley near San Diego, California.
The vision for what is now Maranatha Christian Schools began in the mid 1980s with the founding of Maranatha church, which began humbly as a midweek Bible study led by Pastor Ray Bentley. Just six years later, Pastor Bentley drew a large congregation of followers and built Maranatha Chapel, a non-denominational evangelical Christian church, in San Diego’s north county community of Rancho Penasquitos.
But Pastor Bentley’s vision didn’t stop with a thriving church of 3,000 members. His plan included a school. In the early 1990s, the church opened a preschool and kindergarten and grew each year, adding more grades and students.
In the fall of 1997, Maranatha Chapel moved to a new campus in Rancho Bernardo, which included a 3,000-seat sanctuary, Sunday school buildings, and a 3,000-square-foot bookstore and café. The school took over the space where Maranatha Chapel used to be.
But there were plans to give the school its own home. In the late 1990s, Maranatha purchased 100 acres in Del Sur with the vision to build a campus for its growing school.
In 2002, Frey was hired to head Maranatha Christian Schools with the goal of moving the school toward a new campus. Leadership developed a strategic plan and began working on building layouts. For the master planning, Maranatha turned to the design-build general contractor that built its church campus, Harper Construction Company, Inc. Senior project manager Rich Davies, Sr., worked closely with Frey and Maranatha Chapel’s Pastor Mark Childers to design a phased development. The first phase included 25 classrooms, science labs, computer labs, kindergarten facilities, and administrative offices in a two-story, 40,000-square-foot building. The academic building spread along two wings that wrapped around a courtyard and were connected by a breezeway.
The first phase also included a 20,000-square-foot multipurpose gymnasium building with a basketball court, locker room facilities, and mezzanine. The grounds also held playgrounds and a football/soccer field surrounded by an all-weather running track. A 5,400-square-foot maintenance and storage building was also added to the first phase.
The master plan included future phases for a second academic building to house the high school as enrollment grew, as well as a separate administrative building. In anticipation of future phases, the first plan also included implementing the future planned building infrastructure.
The campus design—which features a Tuscan style with creative use of stone and stucco, high archways and columns, and a clay tile roof—was conceived through a collaboration of church leadership including Pastor Childers, Harper Construction, and Sillman Wright Architects of San Diego.
Extra touches to the campus included a water fountain in the school’s main courtyard and generous use of stone pavers in courtyards and main driveway. Colored concrete was used in core areas of the campus, and stained concrete with decorative banding was used in the main lobby area and exterior breezeways connecting the classroom wings.
The gymnasium/multipurpose building was also designed with a custom center court logo, scoreboards, and fold-up bleachers. The ceiling is open and features beautiful exposed wood trusses.
Construction moved quickly, and the building was ready to accommodate students in time for the 2006-07 school year, except for one problem. There was no main road by which to access the new school.
“This new main road (Maranatha Way) was the responsibility of another developer in the area,” Davies said. “When it became clear the other developer was not going to complete the road on time, Harper Construction worked with the school to complete the permitting and subsequent expedited construction and opening of Maranatha Way only two months before the school was scheduled to open.”
Another challenge was the substantial amount of rough grading that was not anticipated in the early project budgets.
“To help minimize the cost of the additional grading, Harper Construction was able to find other contractors to pay to dump materials on the site since there was a significant amount of import material required on the site,” Davies said. “One hundred percent of the funds generated from this operation were given back to the owner to help offset the additional grading costs.”
The new campus has been beneficial for the school. Enrollment has increased to more than 500 students in kindergarten through 12th grade. The campus currently can hold as many as 700 students. With continued growth in mind, Frey says the school is beginning to move toward a second phase, which includes adding a second classroom building to accommodate the high school students. As the school raises funds to build, it will purchase temporary modular units, which Frey says will be affectionately called “cottages,” in the interim.
Harper Construction Company, Inc. is a design-build general contractor in San Diego. The company has been involved in building religious facilities over the years, including churches and schools, www.harperconstruction.com.
