Bolles School to open STEM-rich innovation center in 2024 with help of $5M gifts

Gifts from two Jacksonville households are covering $10 million of the $26 million price tag for the largest construction project in almost a century at the Bolles School’s San Jose campus.

The 47,000-square-foot Center for Innovation, a STEM learning center for the elite private school, is scheduled to open by March for the school year’s final quarter, Bolles Associate Head of School Mike Drew said.

The center’s 15 classrooms will include space for science, math and technology programs in addition to the building’s half-dozen labs for biology, chemistry and physics and “flex” labs for robotics, computer science and fabrication equipment.

For anatomy lessons, the building will have a 3D Anatomage virtual dissection table like those used in college medical and nursing programs.

The three-story center will be used daily by 800 upper school (high school) students, said Drew, whose school leadership recently selected an innovation director to maximize the center’s benefits.

The building “will be an intellectual incubator for countless young minds who will serve and change our community as entrepreneurs, scientists, engineers, explorers and creative leaders,” Bolles Science Department Chair Nancy Hazzard said in a release about the project.

The project is the most expansive since 1925, when the building now called Bolles Hall was constructed as the San Jose Hotel, the release said. The hotel became part of Bolles when the school opened as a military academy in 1933. The military identity ended in the 1960s.

The building on a bluff facing the east bank of the St. Johns River has been under construction since last year, but the school has been raising money to pay for it all along.

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So, Bolles officials cheered in late October when orthodontics entrepreneur Dana Fender and his wife Hope signed a commitment to match a $5 million donation made earlier by technology executive Frank R. Sanchez.

The two big gifts and a slew of others have brought the school within $8 million of paying off the project, school officials said, even with inflation pushing up the price by about $2.6 million since the end of last year.

This article originally appeared on Florida Times-Union: Jacksonville's Bolles School building $10M Center for Innovation