With construction nearly complete, officials with the British International School of Houston said the new campus will be open in time for the 2016-17 school year.[/caption]

After spending 15 years just outside Loop 610, the British International School of Houston will have a new home in Katy this fall.

With the finishing touches being put on the $80 million, 275,000-square-foot campus at 2203 N. Westgreen Blvd., BISH Principal Andrew Derry said the construction process is on track for completion by the beginning of the 2016-17 school year. Staff is due to arrive Aug. 15, and classes will begin Aug. 29.

BISH is one of 42 schools in 15 different countries operated by parent company Nord Anglia Education—an international schools provider headquartered in Hong Kong.

Derry said after a four- to five-year relocation process that included 18 months of surveying different locations for the new campus, Katy stood out to school officials as the most suitable option.

“It’s fair to say that a lot of areas in Houston put a huge emphasis on education,” he said. “But I think—for us—Katy, just the way it was west of Houston, the emphasis on high-   quality education by just about everyone in Katy and the demographic of the people there, that just seemed to be the ideal spot.”

Although BISH’s enrollment is more than 800 students with representation from over 50 different countries, Derry said the Katy location has been built to accommodate over 2,000 students. However, BISH has chosen to focus on slow and steady growth and does not foresee the enrollment number rising above 900 students for 2016-17, he said.

“It’s very much a community school, and that culture takes a long time to develop,” Derry said. “And if all of a sudden you double in size overnight, you lose that culture; you lose that identity.”

Jonathan Durfield, BISH’s head of partnerships and enrollments, said—in addition to BISH’s small-by-choice approach—unique programs normally reserved for a university setting boost the institution’s reputation.

He said Nord Anglia is known worldwide for its partnership with The Juilliard School—a performing arts conservatory in New York City—and the company has also announced a partnership with Massachusetts Institute of Technology that is set to begin in September.

Due to these two unique curriculum collaborations, BISH is equipped with a Juilliard performing arts center—which includes a professional theater and Juilliard’s signature, sound-isolated ‘black box’ theatre—and 12 investigative science labs.

The wings outline the agora, or library, upstairs and the boma, or cafe, downstairs.[/caption]

Durfield said although other institutions emphasize STEM—science, technology, engineering and mathematics—BISH focuses on STEAM, which incorporates the arts. That focus helps to set the school apart, he said.

“When you look at STEAM, and being able to insert the arts into the STEAM pathway, that’s truly where the jobs of the future are going to exist,” he said. “And to be able to have a partnership, such as a Juilliard and an MIT in the same educational offering really covers the entire STEAM profile. We’re producing a well-rounded student so that they can not only excel, but truly thrive.”

Derry said he expects the new BISH campus in Katy to soon become Nord Anglia’s flagship institution.

“The catchphrase we use is, ‘First the learning, then the building,’” he said. “We worked out what powerful learning looked like. Then we built the building around that philosophy of learning.”