Fayette County Public Schools | Lexington, KY
Tate Hill Jacobs collaborated with Perkins+Will to design this new high school for Fayette County Public Schools in Lexington, organizing 1,800 students across five Small Learning Communities within a 287,000 square foot building. The Small Learning Community model breaks a school this size into smaller, more manageable groups, which lets teachers build interdisciplinary curriculum across subjects and gives the building itself the flexibility to support collaboration and changing modes of instruction rather than a fixed row of identical classrooms.

The campus was designed to be Net Zero-Ready, with daylighting carried through windows, sidelights, clerestories, and Solatubes so that most instructional space relies on natural light rather than fixtures, paired with all-LED lighting, geothermal HVAC, and an insulated concrete form building envelope that keeps conditioning loads low year-round.

That design has held up in operation and drawn recognition alongside it. Frederick Douglass earned a perfect 100 ENERGY STAR score, the first for a high school in Kentucky, and its energy use intensity runs about 60 percent below the average K-12 school. It also carries the lowest utility cost per square foot of any high school in Fayette County Public Schools, and a year after opening, it was recognized as the most energy efficient high school in the nation. The project received an AIA Kentucky Citation and a national ASHRAE Technology Award.

AWARDS: AIA Kentucky Citation