Patriot Wellness Center at Adlai E. Stevenson High School

The visionary Board and administration of Adlai E. Stevenson High School have provided advanced tools and enlightened support to ensure the success of every student as a complete and unique individual in mind and body, while at the same time building for increased enrollment.

High School District 125’s latest innovation is its sustainable, new 83,000 sq. ft. Patriot Wellness Center (PWC), accessible to students of all fitness and skill levels after school and on weekends.

The PWC is the culmination of a $60-million, three-phase construction initiative that included a 20,000 sq. ft. field house expansion and a 6,000 sq. ft. complete renovation of Stevenson’s Student Services Suite, where students are encouraged to receive individualized attention from mental and emotional health professionals, counselors, and social workers as well as academic Deans assigned to each student.

Social-emotional learning is a core value at Stevenson, which understands that mental and physical well-being are inextricably intertwined. PWC provides today's students with quiet rooms for meditating and managing stress in their complex lives, as well as every imaginable means to nurture and strengthen their bodies.

The PWC is not an athletic center for competitive sports but is intentionally described as a wellness center to encourage and empower all students’ self-directed wellness journeys based on PWC’s four pillars of wellness: mindset, sleep, nutrition, and movement.

The first phase of the project expanded the campus infrastructure to produce electricity onsite. This update has generator power to not only support the Fieldhouse & Wellness Center but also contributes power to the surrounding community in times of high demand.

The PWC’s signature three-story lobby provides student-gathering steps against the backdrop of a massive, living green wall – irrigated with harvested rainfall -- filling the daylighted building with better, fresher-smelling air quality than outdoors. It also showcases here its healthful food and beverage “fuel bar.”

This healthy, high-performance building was holistically designed for today’s students by architects, engineers, and K-12, interiors and sustainability specialists at Wight & Company, District 125’s architect and design partner responsible for the school’s facility master plan.

An innovative three-layered second floor isolates the sounds of 90 exercise machines and 14 full racks of free weights – and a 40-yard turf training space – from four multi-use spaces and a first-floor glass-walled dance, fitness, and yoga studio looking onto the green wall. An outdoor, covered deck for organized programs is off the second floor.

About 100 pieces of cardio workout equipment, a group TRX structure for resistance exercise, and spaces for circuit-style training are on the third floor. A physical training and therapy room as well as a sprint track are incorporated into the PWC, with its mission to improve students’ physiological and mental health and reduce individual performance barriers to the long-term success of every student.

The pioneering PWC facility is the first of its kind in its area and is an extraordinary asset for the Patriots of Stevenson High School in Lincolnshire, IL.

Awards:

First Place in the ASHRAE Technology Award Competition for Educational Facilities
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This article was published in ASHRAE Journal, June 2022. Copyright 2022 ASHRAE. Posted at www.ashrae.org. This article may not be copied and/or distributed electronically or in paper form without permission of ASHRAE. For more information, visit www.ashrae.org

Photo Credit: Connor Steinkamp, Steinkamp Photography