Today, an architect meeting was held in Windmoor, giving students an inside look on the future renovations to the Goppert Center. The renovations will add on a new library, publication room, concessions stand, star shop, locker rooms, Campus Ministry office and much more.

Architect David Reid said, “The idea was to create some more technology rich classrooms. The classrooms can then begin to also do a function to help support study space when they’re not used as a scheduled classroom but we want to provide the campus with basically a state of the art library learning commons to help support kind of the evolving educational mission. So you’re going to see more open seating, maybe less of an emphasis on books, more of an emphasis on group study projects and open learning.”

They hope to start the renovations in May but Reid says “it’s a little dependent on on fundraising, but it might be a little delayed. The end goal is to have it completed by next fall of 2018.”

One concept of the new renovations is to provide more space for athletics. This would include new lockers for each student involved in a sport.

Architect Holly Wolf said, “you guys are about 100-150 lockers short right now on your athletics, so not to mention we’re making sure every student has a locker.”

Reid said, “The notion on the athletics side is to improve accessibility to the lower level, provide more space for halftime/pregame functions, more visibility for the star shop, little more expression of student pride through branding and things like that and certainly more of an opportunity to display kind of the legacy of the St. Teresa’s Athletic program.”

The new renovations are also working on making Goppert more handicap accessible, President Nan Bone says “We are doing a handicap accessible viewing from up above too, so instead of a solid concrete there will be a glass on one section so anybody in a wheelchair can just go right up to the front and still stay on the main floor if they wanted to for viewing. And our restrooms are not handicapped accessible, so these new restrooms will be too, so just thinking of every student and adult using our facility.”

The students that attended the meeting were shown photos and floor plans of what the new renovations will look like. The photos are not exactly what the new plans will look like, but are relatively close.

Sophomore and attendee of the meeting Faith Andrews-O’Neal said, “I’m excited for all of it, I think the Campus Ministry is going to be really cool, and I think it’s cool that they’re going to update Goppert.”