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The Holdsworth Center educator-training campus founded by Charles Butt, chairman and CEO of H-E-B.
Along a placid stretch on Lake Austin, tucked out of sight behind a stand of cypress trees, a massive and bustling 44-acre construction project is burgeoning in the hills near the picturesque Pennybacker Bridge northwest of downtown.
Here are designer renderings of the campus, courtesy of The Holdsworth Center.
Interior
The Holdsworth Center
Aerial drone images captured by Austonia this week shows a construction site in full swing, with nearly a dozen structures springing up on one of Lake Austin's last large undeveloped land tracts - the site of the The Holdsworth Center, a new $90 million nonprofit educator-training center funded by H-E-B Chairman and CEO Charles Butt and set to begin operations next spring.
The site is at the bottom of a tree-packed hill dropping to the lakefront from RM 2222 near the confluence of Lake Austin and Bull Creek.
It is all but invisible to cars traveling above it on 2222 and boats cruising past the thicket of trees that conceal it onshore.
"It is one of the last large undeveloped tracts on Lake Austin and is likely the last one inside Loop 360," David Armbrust, the Austin attorney handling the zoning case, told the Austin-American Statesman in 2017, which reported the value of the land at nearly $14M.
When it's complete, the campus will include 180,000 square feet of learning and overnight space in 18 buildings, including a 300-person capacity event room and 186 rooms for overnight stays, according to the center's website.
Butt, who has pledged $100 million to the project, named it for his mother, Mary Elizabeth Holdsworth, a former school teacher and philanthropist.
Holdsworth officials said the delay from fall 2020 to spring 2021 was due in part to construction issues and in part to the coronavirus.
See land use and mobility plans on file with the city embedded in this article.
Designers Lake Flato Architects and Ten Eyck Landscape Architects included undeveloped area on more than half of the site, preserving 3,000 native trees for visitors to enjoy while they meet and relax during training events.
The Holdsworth has been training educators at various sites for three years, but the campus will serve "as a permanent home for public school educators to develop as leaders, a place they will return to time and again to grow, learn, collaborate, reflect and gather inspiration to take back to their districts.
The center will be available for third-party rentals to benefit the mission of the center.
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(Bob Daemmrich)
“You start with the signage,” he said. “You know exactly where the entrance is, and that’s for first responders too. We really want to make sure we keep up with visitor patterns. If they come in, they go through a system. Driver’s license, background check, which takes about a minute. We have a software system.”
AISD Director of Operations Matias Segura explains the overall school construction and what the entry vestibule looks like. (Rich Oppel)
The vestibule has two sets of locked doors. The exterior set has an audio-visual intercom, operated by a desk officer who has a view of visitor parking, the building approach and the vestibule. If allowed in, a visitor is buzzed through and then faces questioning and clearance by the desk officer. The visitor is given a card-reader pass. If a second person attempts to “trail in” behind another visitor, he is trapped in the vestibule until his status is determined. The second set of doors, into the main school building, remains locked and shut. It is open when students arrive in the morning.
Thus, the days of walking into the school, maybe waving at the principal’s executive assistant and strolling off to the cafeteria for lunch with your daughter are gone, a relic of a more bucolic time when “active shooters” were never imagined. But one must ask, what do we give up for greater safety?
Austinites remembered the Uvalde shooting victims in a vigil at the Texas Capitol in May. (Tony Fuentes)
Some critics argue that we are at risk of losing traditional values in the redesign of schools, courthouses, hospitals, churches and shopping centers. Writing in The Washington Post, architecture critic Philip Kennicott said the nation’s gun culture “threatens an essential precondition for democracy: its public space… Ideals of openness, flow, transparency and access will no longer be sustainable.”
Segura contemplates the question. At 41, he has held his job as AISD director of operations for four and a half years. Prior to that he was a consultant who led the team to build Austin’s new courthouse. His Austin and Texas roots are deep. He was born here, graduated from Bowie High, and went off to Lubbock to earn a degree in civil engineering from Texas Tech. He returned to secure an MBA at the University of Texas at Austin. He and his wife Joy Burson-Segura have two daughters who attend AISD schools. Segura said he and his operations team love AISD, care deeply about their work, and want citizens “to see us as partners.”
Back to what we lose in hardening the schools.
Segura says, “We think about students’ health. Having daylight, bringing light into a hardened facility, being able to access outdoor learning areas, (which is) hypercritical, especially in what we have learned in the pandemic.” Segura doesn’t like the idea of moats around schools (exotic, expensive) nor of classroom bomb shelters (what would teachers and students think about their looming presence?), efforts that are being tried elsewhere.
Healthcare workers receive the Moderna COVID-19 vaccine at the AISD Performing Arts Center in Mueller in 2021. (Jordan Vonderhaar)
AISD must juggle school security with the historic use of our schools for other purposes, such as voting, PTA-PTO meetings, community fairs, and, more recently, COVID-19 testing, vaccinations and food distribution. AISD does not want to end those uses, so the challenge is to design schools with separate rooms or places for those uses.
Clearly, Segura has thought about balancing conflicting equities. For him, it’s not all locked doors and blank brick or concrete walls. He stresses the importance of building a culture that includes shared responsibility of all school employees where, for example, a custodian could ask a stranger whether they have a visitor’s badge. All staffers should be well-trained in security measures, knowledgeable about new technology, and committed to working as a team to protect students, teachers and others. “We are working very, very hard on the culture,” he says. “Also, we need (financial) investment if we are going to move the needle.”
(Laura Figi)
Kennicott, the Washington Post critic, quotes the late Sen. Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist and New York Democrat, who said, “Architecture is inescapably a political art, and it reports faithfully for ages to come what the political values of a particular era were. Surely, ours must be openness and fearlessness in the face of those who hide in darkness.”
But that was in 2001. What messages will Austin’s new public schools convey to future generations about our 2021 political values?
“First and foremost, these are education spaces that belong to our community. Our objective is to create incredible learning experiences for our students and at the same time ensure that the students and staff are safe.” He said he wants people to view schools as “inspired,” places where they would want to send their children. “Great things are happening in that space,” and that teachers see a place where they want to work and where they feel safe.
Voters in AISD will decide Nov. 8 on a $2.44 billion bond package to provide “funding for improvements to enhance safety, centers on equity, benefits every campus, and addresses affordability,” according to AISD officials.
