Career Tech CentersCentral OhioColumbus

Tolles Cybersecurity Lab Renovation

Tolles Technical & Career Center in Plain City runs its cybersecurity program in two adjoining classrooms — 4,393 square feet of space built for general instruction and asked to hold a lab. The carpet, the ceiling grid and the 2x4 troffers were the ones the rooms came with, and the electrical service behind them was never sized for the number of machines a security program now puts on the floor.

The district rebuilt both rooms rather than refitting them. Prodigy carried the architectural and engineering design and the permitting, then took the space down: carpet, ceiling pads and grid out throughout, walls demolished where the new plan called for it, doors returned to the owner, and a new storage room framed into the corner of the room, symmetrical with the space beside it. New commercial-grade nylon carpet tile and a new acoustical grid and pads went back in. The panel serving the space was upgraded and the branch wiring reworked for 50 computer stations and their technology load, distributed through a subfloor power and data raceway. LED backlit panels with occupancy controls and dimmers replaced the troffers, new casework at the rear took over storage, walls and existing door frames were painted, and the existing PA and intercom was relocated into the new ceiling layout.

Cooling was the other half of the problem. Fifty stations put more heat into two classrooms than a system sized for general instruction was ever meant to move, so a supplemental system was added for the warmer months and the wall thermostats moved with the new layout. Four 85-inch smart displays are mounted in each space, and the desk layout was left open to revision with school personnel.

Tolles cybersecurity lab workstations under blue LED cove lighting

Tolles lab with red accent lighting and gaming workstations

Glass wall and ceiling lighting at the Tolles cybersecurity lab

Technical Discussion

A lab that has to look like the industry it teaches

Career-tech enrollment is decided by eighth graders on a tour. They walk four or five programs in a morning, and what they carry away is not the curriculum sheet — it is whether the room looked like a place adults work. A cybersecurity lab competes for those students against the district's own programs and against every other option in the county, and the room is the part of that pitch the school actually controls.

That is the reason the power and data go under the floor. A subfloor raceway serving 50 stations costs more than running the perimeter and dropping cords, and it buys two things. Cords crossing a floor are the detail that reads converted classroom, and they are what a room full of teenagers eventually pulls loose. The second is that the desk layout stops being permanent — the scope leaves it open to revision after review with school personnel, and a grid of power and data in the floor is what makes that revision furniture work instead of electrical work.

Lighting follows the same logic. Replacing 2x4 troffers with backlit LED panels on occupancy controls and dimmers is not an energy line item here. A room where every student is reading a screen cannot be lit like a room facing a whiteboard; the dimmers let an instructor take the level down for screen work and bring it back for everything else, and the occupancy control keeps that from becoming a room somebody left dark.

Cooling is the item most often cut, and it decides whether the room is usable in the months when tours and summer programming happen. Fifty machines are a continuous load in a space whose HVAC was sized for a general classroom, which is why supplemental cooling is in the scope rather than a fan in a window. None of this is decoration. It is the difference a family can see in October between a lab and a classroom with computers in it.

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