Belleville 201’s CAVE is expanding programs and, soon, adding square footage

It’s been one year since Belleville School District 201’s Center for Academic and Vocational Excellence — or the CAVE for short — opened its doors to students, and now the district has plans for growth.

The CAVE consists of Belleville 201’s alternative high school for about 110 at-risk students who study at the facility full-time and a trade school for about 250 to 300 students who come from Belleville West and East for parts of their school days to get dual-credit, in-demand vocational training.

The center opened in August 2022 at 7645 Magna Drive, occupying a renovated 100,000-square-foot Kings Point property that was at one point a tennis club owned by John Connors.

At the beginning of its first year, the CAVE had partnerships with more than 25 businesses and offered training in culinary arts, welding, carpentry, automotive, and machining and metal. In the second semester, it added aviation to its repertoire.

Now, Superintendent Brian Mentzer said the center has more than 60 business partners, and this upcoming semester, it’s adding more aviation curriculum as well as training in early childhood education. Two Ellis Elementary pre-K classrooms have been established on the second floor where CAVE students can get teaching and observation credits.

To accommodate growth, the CAVE is going from two sessions of programming a day (morning and afternoon) to three sessions (morning, midday and afternoon) this school year, Mentzer said.

Come this time next year, the CAVE will also be physically growing.

The district is planning to construct a 15,000-square-foot annex along the southeast edge of the main building. Mentzer said he hopes to have students in the annex by the beginning of the 2024-25 school year or by the middle of the year at the latest.

He said the annex will allow the CAVE to:

• Expand its programming for aviation to include avionics and airframe work

• Expand the district’s existing healthcare programming

• Establish new programming for advanced business applications, which will include more business partnerships

• Establish programming for automation, manufacturing and robotics, which will integrate additional technology like intelligent “cobots” — that is, collaborative robots — into manufacturing processes

Mentzer said the programming is still being developed and will be finalized in the coming months.

He said the district doesn’t have a budget for the annex expansion yet but will do it the same way it approached acquiring and renovating the main building — without burdening taxpayers. The district funded the $1.5 million purchase and $7.5 million renovation of the Kings Point property through accrued reserves and freed-up capital, some of which came from increases in state funding.

“So we’re trying to find a way to construct the (annex) building that’s both economical and kind of provides the utility that we want, and also flexibility so that if something changes we can make a modification to the building to add programming or move programming,” he said.

Mentzer added that the district’s tax rate has decreased over the past four or five years.

The CAVE offers taxpayers a “bang for the buck” because of its impact on kids, local industry and the community, he said. Take the center’s partnership with Gulfstream Aerospace Corp. for example.

In the second semester last year, the CAVE started an experimental aviation program in cooperation with Gulfstream as it’s expanding operations at St. Louis Downtown Airport in Cahokia Heights that will create 200 jobs and retain nearly 500.

Gulfstream and Belleville 201 instructors have been working together to train students in skills like cabinet finishing, composites and upholstery for new aircraft. Mentzer said that when Gulfstream did initial hiring for its expansion efforts, it hired eight students from the program.

He said this is an example of the CAVE’s impact; when Gulfstream hires students, it pays them, trains them more and provides them with healthcare and retirement benefits.

“I know a lot of our kids, that changes their whole life trajectory. Not only theirs, their potentially multi-generational home has changed now for the better,” Mentzer said.

“Education is a door-opener,” he said, but the CAVE is “a different kind of a door-opener.”

Mentzer also said “the success rate is unbelievable” for the alternative school.

He said the graduation rate is about the same as the regular high schools’ graduation rates, “which is almost unheard of for an alternative high school.”