Rendering of what AUP will look like. (Courtesy of AUP)

A vacant office building and an abandoned movie theater on a congested corner between Third and Figueroa Street will soon be home to the American University Preparatory School (AUP), a boarding school that will house and educate 300 freshman and sophomore high school students in downtown Los Angeles this fall. 

The school’s website claims AUP will offer “one of the most unique learning environments in education,” with an emphasis on STEAM: science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics. 

And while opening a boarding school in a location not associated with education may seem odd, founding headmaster and chief executive officer David Unruh feels students need the downtown Los Angeles environment to truly thrive. 

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“When one thinks about boarding schools, you generally think about schools outside the city or in the suburbs, lots of green space and a kind of sheltered environment.  AUP has been conceived quite differently,” Unruh said. “We are developing a curriculum that, inside and outside the classroom, utilizes partnerships with the rich artistic community in downtown L.A. — the Los Angeles Philharmonic, the Colburn School, museums, architects, designers — you name it.”

With a lofty tuition fee of $46,325 for the 2014-2015 school year, AUP will most likely be tapping into the growing number of international students that come to the United States to become acclimated into the education system and lifestyle before applying to U.S. colleges. International high schoolers have flocked to the U.S. in soaring numbers from 6,500 in 2007 to 65,000 in 2012, according to federal statistics. 

According to Unruh, there has been an even number of domestic, as well as international, students from countries including Africa, Romania, Italy, China and Thailand who have applied for the upcoming school year. 

Unruh feels that this surge of international students coming to the United States for high school has come as a result of a transition from an emphasis on test score results to a more well rounded learning experience. 

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“At AUP, we focus not only on traditional concept learning and SAT performance, but also on helping students acquire the skill to look at issues from an interdisciplinary perspective.  Our students will be creative problem-solvers in addition to being "good students" by conventional standards,” Unruh said. 

For University of Southern California business administration major Paula Cruz attending Culver Academy, a college preparatory boarding school in Indiana, provided her with an education and experience she could not have received in her hometown of Chihuahua, Mexico. 

“Schools in Mexico are not as academically developed as schools in the U.S., and they generally do not allow a student to personalize his or her schedule to his or her interests,” Cruz said. “Although being away from home at such a young age was hard, it really made me grow as a person and find out who I truly wanted to be.”

Cruz feels that boarding schools provide international students an opportunity to become acclimated to an American lifestyle before attending universities that offer rigorous classes.

“Culver definitely helped prepare me for USC. It allowed me to be immersed in a different culture prior to attending college and made me accustomed to the American way of studying,” Cruz said. Culver was also a very demanding college prep school, so it taught me the right habits for time management.”

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Students at AUP will also be expected to keep up with demanding academia, as Unruh says students will be working towards admittance at top colleges and universities. Unruh also feels a unique teaching style called “flipped classrooms,” will give AUP students an edge as students will learn material outside of the classroom from recorded faculty lectures. 

“The classroom time is focused on project-based learning and other group processes. This approach really helps English as a second language learners since they can go over the content several times before class,” Unruh said. 

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Dr. Pedro Garcia of USC’s Rossier School of Education says that any addition to the current environment education is a positive. 

“In the past students have had little choice because they were assigned to a school based on their home location and that was it,” Dr. Garcia said. “Today we have charter schools, magnet schools, pilot schools, big picture schools, dual immersion schools and arts and technology school so students have more flexibility, which in our culture is a good thing.”

It’s hard to predict just how successful AUP will be in downtown Los Angeles, but come fall 2014 Unruh is confident the expansive work that has gone into creating AUP will produce some of the brightest students. 

“The AUP educational experience is one of full engagement with the curriculum, with our faculty, who are not just teachers but educators, with their fellow students and also with the city around them,” Unruh said. 

Reach Staff Reporter McKenna Aiello here, and follow her on Twitter @McKennaAiello.