Classrooms filling up at MASE

Biotech charter schools to continue expansion in 2008

Memphis Business Journal
December 31, 2007
By Toby Sells

The Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering got a lot of press when it became Tennessee's first charter school in 2003, but since then it has slowly added classes, students and square footage.

The school began with 147 students, says MASE principal Tommie Henderson, and has grown to 658. He says the goal is to bring the school to 1,000 students and to eventually bring them all to one campus.

The student body is now divided between three floors of the Memphis Bioworks Foundation building on Dudley Avenue and about 40,000 square feet on MASE's Jefferson Avenue campus. The school occupies a total of about 122,000 square feet.

"Basically, we have three programs -- a middle school, a ninth grade academy and a high school," Henderson says. "We have been juggling students for the last five years to make sure we have intelligent space for them."

'Intelligent space' is a concept Henderson says respects the different needs of students at different times of their lives.

"Ninth graders live in a different world, so we want them to have a different building to deal with some of the chaos you have in ninth grade," Henderson says. "Also, we want to create a haven for 12th graders, to make them a learning space that is a little different from a typical high school. We'd like to create a dorm on campus, too, so our seniors, with their parents' permission, could live on campus."

The school began with six classrooms on 10,000 square feet of the Bioworks building and then added 100,000 square feet when it acquired the buildings that used to house Christian schools for Mississippi Boulevard Christian Church and Bellevue Baptist Church.

In the beginning, MASE only used 40,000 square feet of the building and began renovating the rest. The school has finished and grown into the entire former library. Henderson says they've just completed renovations on three floors for 6th, 7th and 8th graders he calls "immaculate" and "beautiful."

"That goes along with our philosophy with kids in middle and pre-high school," he says. "There are huge psychological differences between these kids, so it is ideal to put them on different floors."

He hopes to renovate another 15,000 square feet in another three floors next summer. He'd like to add a gymnasium as well as give students a common place to connect. That will mean more renovation and probably new construction.

MASE is sponsored by the Bioworks Foundation and its president, Steve Bares, says the growth of MASE has been incremental, "inch by inch."

"Each one of these little expansions -- whether it is getting new laptops or smart cards or seats for the cafeteria -- they help us build the kind of school we want to have in Memphis," he says. "This was an entrepreneurial effort and it is hard work."

He says MASE achieves a couple of things for Memphis. The first, he says, is a strategic effort to grow hometown talent. The projected 1,000 MASE students are expected to go to college and add to the Memphis work force -- some of those will work in the bioscience and biotech industries.

The second part is less tangible.

"We took these kids from some of the toughest schools and they did things that people said couldn't be done," Bares says, noting students' above-average SAT scores for Memphis. "That's when we win. These kids came right out of a standard pool of students and we can't see why every kid can't get the same kind of education these do."

Memphis Academy of Science and Engineering

Charter school focused on math and science
Principal: Tommie Henderson
Students: 658, grades 5 through 12
Address: 1254 Jefferson
Phone: (901) 333-1580
Web site: www.discovermase.org

tsells@bizjournals.com | 259-1724