The rumble of bulldozers can be heard across The Bear Creek School campus each day. It is a welcome sound. After 25 years of steady growth, including 14 years at the campus on Union Hill in Redmond, The Bear Creek School is expanding.

In June, Bear Creek began construction of a new 50,000-square-foot building on adjacent property south of the existing Redmond Campus on 208th Avenue Northeast. The facility will house the upper school (grades 9-12) and a Fine & Performing Arts Center. Construction is on pace to finish next summer, with students occupying the building in August 2015.

The new upper school will have a collegiate environment, with separate floors for the humanities and for math and science. The physical layout will accommodate increased enrollment and will enable additional program and curriculum development and integration. The centerpiece of the new building is a central atrium that will offer flexible areas for student leadership development, learning micro-communities, study sessions and student-faculty interaction beyond the classroom walls. This atrium will also serve as the cafeteria midday and theater reception area in the evening.

The Fine & Performing Arts Center will have an auditorium-style theater with 350 seats, a fly loft and high-quality sound and lighting systems. In addition to the theater, the center will include specially designed rooms for instruction in visual arts, music and drama, as well as dressing rooms and storage areas. The theater will be available for community rental when not in use by the school.

The new building will impact students in every division, not just the upper school. Over the next year as the building goes up, Bear Creek will re-imagine its existing facilities to provide distinct, age-appropriate learning environments with additional space and flexibility for academic, programmatic and psychosocial student engagement and growth. With the new building, Bear Creek will gradually increase its graduating class size to 72 students, while individual classrooms or sections will remain at 16-18 students.