By Jessica Benda
Contributing Writer
Educators will once again find a home in the historic Lydia D. Killefer building, one of the first California schools to voluntarily desegregate in 1944.
Chapman University is restoring the landmark constructed in 1931 to use as its new Institute for Quantum Studies, a hub for Chapman researchers and educators that will include an advanced physics laboratory and an experimental physics wing. Located on North Olive Street, just north of Walnut Avenue, the Killefer building has gone mostly unoccupied since the school’s closure in 1980, and Chapman University officials hope to liven its halls by spring 2025.
“We’re bringing fresh elements that allow us to be respectful of its more than 90-year heritage, and we also feel like we’re resetting it to have its next 90 years,” said Collette Creppell, Chapman’s vice president of campus planning and design.
The Orange Unified School District opted for integration at Killefer School three years before the landmark Mendez, et al v. Westminster decision mandated desegregation for children of Mexican ancestry in California, setting a precedent for the U.S. Supreme Court’s decision in Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka in 1954, which ended legal segregation nationally.
The primary occupants of the Institute of Quantum Studies will be researchers who double as Chapman educators, teaching classes on the core campus just a mere two blocks away. It will be a home base for both theoretical and experimental physics, Creppell said. Its open and airy nature, courtesy of a pre-air conditioning design, seemed like the perfect fit for research, she said.
“The same way as the students used to spill out into the schoolyard, these theorists will be able to go out and extend their thought-work into the three courtyards that are defined by this historic school,” Creppell said.
One of Killefer’s updated features will be a new entrance from North Olive Street, which will lead…
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