Oh that Brad Alexander is clever.

As work has progressed on the revamping of the Studer Community Institute Building here at Garden and Spring streets, we’ve seen this city landmark have new life breathed into it.

Especially our front plaza.

This space is meant to draw in the public and become a hub of activity. A place to hang out, eat lunch, host an event or a meeting for your community group of nonprofit.

Then Alexander, a landscape architect at Jerry Pate Designs, shared some secret smarts worked into part of the plaza’s design.

“I hid a little Easter Egg in the plaza design,” Alexander shared. “The neurotransmitter acetylcholine and its molecular structure are hidden within the playground surface pattern."

“Acetylcholine is a neurotransmitter which science believes plays a major role in long-term memory retention. This was conceived to pay respect to the Early Childhood Learning Initiative. You can of course utilize the circles in many other ways; however, we thought you all would enjoy the back story.”

Fun with a subtext of learning. We dig it.

In fact, it is the essence of the Early Learning City concept.

When Studer Community Institute developed a “Roadmap to an Early Learning City,” it was as much a wish list as anything else. The ideas that we shared about how every part of our community could be reimagined to support early learning experiences were a combination of things we had seen in other communities and hopes we had for our own.

Healthcare, community resources, architecture and the environment, education, business and media all have ownership of part of the Early Learning City concept, as we developed it back in  2016.

We all have ownership of it because we all have a stake in the results. Those stakes are our children — children of our blood and of our heart — and their ability to contribute to the growth and vibrancy of our community as they grow up.

We started our own work in the healthcare and community resources areas. Our Brain Bag project is the in-hospital education piece of the early learning puzzle. Since we began the project, more than 9,200 bags have been distributed to families.

Parents who have received these toolkits rate their knowledge before the lesson at 7 out of 10; after the lesson, they rate their knowledge of the role parent talk plays in healthy brain development at a 9.6.

In our first year we worked with the community resource partners Healthy Start Coalition, Early Steps, Children’s Home Society, Families First Network and the Pearl Nelson Center to spread the Brain Bags even further in the community.

The way that architects like Alexander, and like Miller Caldwell whose firm designed the sensory garden at the Bodacious Brew drive-thru on Main Street near Palafox, is remarkable, unexpected and heartening.

Keep taking the Roadmap and making it your own. There’s room for everyone on this journey. And we won’t get there unless we all travel together.