Alternative Center for Excellence

The Alternative Center for Excellence, formerly the Alternative Center for Education, is located in the former Locust Avenue School at 26 Locust Avenue in Danbury, Connecticut, United States. It is an alternative high school within the city's school system, meant for at-risk students.The building itself, a brick Romanesque Revival structure, was designed by architect Warren R. Briggs in 1896, and later featured in his book Modern American School Buildings. For many years it was an elementary school, and a laboratory school where recent graduates of the state's teacher training schools were sent to hone their skills with actual students before going to their ultimate teaching jobs.Today it is the last nineteenth-century school building remaining in Danbury, and one of the few remaining laboratory school buildings in the state. It was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1985.BuildingThe school occupies a 1.1acre lot at the north end of the block formed by Locust, Ninth and Roberts avenues in an otherwise residential neighborhood. Western Connecticut State University, formerly the Danbury State Normal School where the teachers at the school were trained in its laboratory era, is a block to the west. Downtown Danbury is a mile (1.6 km) to the west-southwest, and Danbury Hospital is to the northwest along Locust.