“The school is designed for young people where the traditional kind of school program just doesn’t work for them,” said Jerry Farley, vice president of career technical education with Oakmont Education, which runs Liberty High and similar schools across the state.
Liberty High School serves young people between the ages of 15 and 21 who did not succeed in traditional school settings. Liberty students are high school dropouts, who officials like to call “opportunity youth.” Opportunity youth are not in school and not working.
Some students have life issues. They may already have kids or they may have struggled in school due to bullying or learning or mental health challenges.
Liberty High School currently is located at 140 N. Keowee St., about two miles from the site of its new home.
Liberty High, which opened in 2018, has about 350 students, but the new public high school facility may be able to enroll 400 or more students, Farley said. Liberty High School’s current home is a windowless building in an industrial part of the city.
The new two-story facility will have 22,000 square feet of space, including labs, academic rooms, offices and an esports play area, where students can compete in video games.
Learning spaces will mimic work-place environments. For instance, nail tech spaces resemble a salon, while culinary spaces will have a full working kitchen and areas that feel like a shop or bistro. Health care spaces will resemble doctors’ offices.
Liberty High provides alternative pathways for young people to get a high school diploma or earn nationally recognized industry credentials to help them pursue a variety of careers, Farley said.
Farley said the new facility will be a huge improvement over the current school property, which is not easy for people to find and access.
“This will give us our own identity, and it puts us in a really prominent place,” he said. “It will help us get the word out even more that we are here and who we are and what we do.”
Liberty High School has a three-year placement rate of 84%, which means graduates overwhelmingly are employed, enrolled in school or enlisted in the military, Farley said. Most Liberty High students live within a few miles of the school property.
Farley said research has found that every student who drops out of high school ends up costing their communities about $308,000 over the span of their lifetime.
High school dropouts on average earn significantly less than high school graduates, and research has found that the economic costs extend beyond lost wages and taxes, and include social services and criminal justice system expenses.
Last year, some people who live in the South Park and Walnut Hills neighborhood criticized Liberty High’s plans, claiming the site was a bad location for a new school facility. Critics said the school could harm traffic patterns at a busy intersection, and they wanted to see that property redeveloped into a commercial use.
Keith Klein, a senior economic development specialist, last year said the site had been vacant for many years and it attracted very little interest from developers. He said a new school was the highest and best use for the property.
Leslie Sheward, president of the Twin Towers Neighborhood Association, last year said the vacant school site was hurting efforts to redevelop the surrounding area.
“For 23 years, Twin Towers has waited for a project such as this,” she said.
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