Major renovations to the Ware Student Commons (WSC) at Amarillo College will be completed early next year, at which point specialized academic tutoring recourses – now scattered in different buildings – will be united under one roof.
Additionally, Lynn Library, long a mainstay on the building’s uppermost fourth floor, will be fully redesigned and relocated to the third floor, where it will rest adjacent to the Writer’s Corner, long an occupant of Ordway Hall. And such student-centered assets as AC’s math and science testing centers and the behavioral health and wellness Counseling Center also will be moved into the WSC from other locations.
Further aspects of the makeover include a modest expansion of the Advocacy and Resource Center (ARC), best known for its food pantry, which will continue to anchor the northeast corner on the WSC’s first floor; and the addition of offices on the second floor to accommodate success coaches, those who are charged with individually helping students navigate the College.
“Everything has been planned with a purpose,” Emily Gilbert, director of the library, said. “The ARC, the Counseling Center, and the math and science testing centers will all be on the first floor and create a welcoming atmosphere.
“I’m excited, because when the dust clears from all this construction, our students will find everything they need basically in one location – a building designed to serve not only the academic needs of our students, but where social services also are visible and plentiful. They’ll no longer have to traipse all over campus to find what they need.”
The WSC is scheduled to be fully functioning in February 2025. Overall cost of the four-floor makeover is just under $5.7 million, and funding comes from the remainder of the $89 million bond that Amarillo voters passed in 2019.
On the fourth floor, which currently houses Lynn Library, the tutoring centers that specialize in math and science will take up residence. Each will be equipped with a variety of learning spaces to accommodate group and individual tutoring, as well as glassed-in seclusion.
The third-floor library setup features a welcoming front desk and lower rows of shelving – called stacks – that do not block patrons from seeing the entire length of the library even as they browse. The design also includes a number of quiet study rooms, an improvement that has been on Gilbert’s wish list for a long time.
But she also sees the value of a library that sits in very close proximity not only to specific tutoring services on the floor above, but to the soon to be adjacent Writer’s Corner, which serves students of every academic major.
“Often, students are advised at the Writer’s Corner to go do research for a paper at the library, but there’s sometimes a disconnect between the buildings,” Gilbert said. “I get it; I’ve been that student who got help in one place and figured that would suffice, like maybe I’ll hit that other building tomorrow, but for whatever reason I never actually got around to it.
“Now, however, our library and our Writer’s Corner will be on the same floor of the same building, and we can walk across from one area to another and offer help in real time. There is no doubt that it will help our students to succeed,” she said.”
Danny Smith, bond project manager, says the WSC was originally going to undergo renovations only on the third and fourth floors, but as additional needs arose, the project was expanded to meet them.
“We’ve managed to do a great deal with the $89 million the community authorized for major renovations back in 2019,” Smith said. “But costs spiraled beyond our control when the pandemic hit, and so we’ve had to prioritize and significantly scale back our to-do list.
“But one commitment we made that we’ve never wavered on is our commitment to make sure that whatever projects we do undertake, we do them right and we do them well,” he said. “I believe the Ware Commons is going to be another prime example of that – a significant asset to the Washington Street Campus.”
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