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Pardon Our Dust!
Education Service Center Region 12 to Expand Main Offices in Waco

As the Education Service Center Region 12 approaches its 40th year anniversary, it is pleased to announce its plans for expansion at its main offices in Waco.  The center has been living with growing pains for several years and often houses workshops at offsite locations, such as area churches and hotels.  The facility expansion will include a 20,000+ square foot addition on the east side of the existing building, with a new entrance facing Bagby Avenue.

“We are excited about the expansion because it will offer more opportunities under one central location for our educators," said Tom Norris, executive director for ESC Region 12. The new facility will include eight meeting rooms.  Four of the rooms, with folding partitions, can be combined into one large room to accommodate up to 400. One room will be a dedicated computer lab and one will be devoted to the Texas Education Telecommunications Network (TETN), where numerous educators meet to attend statewide and regional meetings made available through videoconferencing technologies.  The center’s print shop will also be located in the new facility for better customer access.

Construction will begin around November 13 and is expected to be completed by December 2007. The center’s alternative teacher certification program will move its offices and classes from the existing building to this new area. This move will allow easier access to designated meeting areas. On any given week, the center provides dozens of trainings which attract hundreds and sometimes thousands of area educators to the center. In the last year alone, the center trained or delivered services to more than 35,000 educators, parents and students. In addition to the building expansion, a new parking lot has been built behind the service center to replace much of the parking that will be needed for the building expansion.

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• Images of Projected Improvements