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    »     AMARILLO ISD

An Open Concept School

Last summer, AISD and the school board began looking at an 

opportunity to purchase the warehouse and operations property 
of the now-defunct Hastings Entertainment. In November, 
the board voted to purchase the 16.5-acre, 200,000-square ft. 
property at 3601 Plains Blvd. The colossal space is twice the 
size of the average Walmart Supercenter and offers enormous 
opportunity to further realize the District’s vision, and the 
community’s vision for the District, to empower scholars to be 
thinkers, communicators, collaborators and contributors. It 
could look completely unlike any traditional school space, with a 
fl exible schedule and seating and classroom space that encourages 
collaboration.  

“We envision it to be an innovative kind of education, not 

based entirely on a bell schedule, not based entirely on seat time,” 
Dr. West says of the Hastings space. “It should be a space where 
you can create your own projects and solve problems within our 
community. We want a STEM focus, and particularly a focus on 
coding, because that is the way the world works now. People who 
can code can fi gure out problems, from cyber security to running 
entire organizations and all of their technology.” 

Creating a new specialty learning environment, an innovation 

academy, is no short order. In the fall, Dr. West instructed a 
team of administrators to begin defi ning and planning how the 
Hastings space would be used. AISD Director of Counseling 
Tracey Morman is on that team. Like other administrators, Tracey 
networks with professional contacts across the country to help 
AISD stay up-to-date with developments emerging in education. 
“Educators elsewhere do look to Amarillo ISD for many things. 
They want to know what we’re doing and how to replicate it,” says 
Tracey. “Because we’re kind of on an island with our location, it 
becomes easy to forget we’re already doing a lot of amazing things 
in education in Amarillo.”

But, as confi dent as she is in the education already offered 

to AISD students, Tracey doesn’t deny the need for something 
more. She imagines the kind of learning that is envisioned for 
the innovation academy will take education in Amarillo to a 

different plane. “Right now, we have elementary campuses that 
are Skyping across the country or even around the world to have 
book discussions. Right now, we have electronic textbooks and a 
1:1 ratio of students to devices in our high schools. But, to look 
to the future and see an innovative environment and resources, 
an incubator of ideas where we’re able to prepare our students for 
jobs that don’t yet exist, is incredible.”

As Tracey notes, there are innovative practices and opportunities 

at play in AISD every day. Even in elementary schools, students get 
their fi rst hands-on experience with innovation in creative coves 
called Makerspaces and in STEM zones, where they’re introduced 
to coding, robotics and the fundamentals of engineering. District-
wide, AISD’s staff of Learning, Design and Technology coaches 
works to foster collaboration and innovation for educators and 
scholars by integrating technology into the curriculum. At the 
Amarillo Area Center for Advanced Learning (AACAL), more 
than 1,000 students a year from AISD, area high schools, private 
and home schools, benefi t from the area’s only specialty school. 

As Principal of AACAL, Jay Barrett oversees the unique 

campus. In 1995, a grant from the National Science Foundation 
helped create AACAL. Today, AACAL offers specialized education 
in fi ve programs of study: animal science, automotive technology, 
engineering, graphic design and health science. For AACAL 
students, part of the school day is spent at their home high school 
campus and part of the day at AACAL.  Though both AACAL and 
the new innovation academy will provide specialized programs, 
Jay says the two will be distinctly different. “The biggest difference 
from AACAL is there will be separate programs of study. Some 
AACAL programs could move to the new open concept school, 
and we’ll be able to add other programs here at AACAL,” he says. 
“The innovation academy is really going to be different from 
any other school. I envision it having an extended schedule in 
the day, where some students may not arrive until 10 a.m., but 
they would go until six at night. I can see robotics, computer 
science and entrepreneurship. More than anything it’s going to be 
collaborative. It is going to be for the student who wants a more 
free-fl owing and open-ended structure with their classes.”