A watercolor rendering shows the future Agawam High School campus.
Reminder Publishing photo by Sarah Heinonen
AGAWAM — Residents and town officials got a look at the latest designs for the new Agawam High School at a public meeting on Nov. 20. Agawam Mayor Christopher Johnson, who also serves as the chair of the Agawam High School Building Committee, highlighted the state-of-the-art features, while emphasizing that decisions were made based on the lessons other schools learned in their school builds.
“We visited a dozen schools as part of our research,” Johnson said. On those tours, he said he repeatedly heard, “We wish we never did that” in reference to several ideas, such as trophy cases and loud cafeterias. “[The design] has all been vetted and vetted, and vetted again,” with school staff and town departments, he said.
In June, voters overwhelmingly approved a debt exclusion to pay for the $230 million project. The town expects to receive $99 million in reimbursements from the Massachusetts School Building Authority, a semi-governmental agency that helps fund school facilities. The project was designed by the architecture firm Flansburgh and will be built by contractor Fontaine Bros. The Agawam High School Building Committee contracted with LeftField as its owner’s project manager, which oversees the project throughout the design and construction process.
The main building will consist of two, two-story wings. The community wing houses the auditorium, cafeteria, chorus and band rooms, and two gymnasiums on the second floor, one of which is college sized. Kent Kovacs, senior vice president of Flansburgh, pointed out the colonnade around the community wing. “We’re trying to have this campus feel,” he said.
The second wing, connected to the first by walkways and a turfed courtyard that can be used for outdoor classes, is the academic wing. The wing contains three “pods.” Rather than clustering classrooms for science, math and language arts in separate areas, each pod will contain classrooms, science labs, a media center and a central “collaboration area,” Johnson shared.
He said the days of each teacher having their own classroom are ending. Because teachers are contractually obligated to have planning periods and lunch, each classroom is empty for a couple of periods — up to 40% of the day. Teachers will rotate in and out of classrooms and spend their planning periods in rooms set aside for that purpose. With specific equipment and infrastructure required for the sciences, dedicated classrooms and labs will be built for those subjects. There are also more special education spaces than are required by the MSBA. Johnson said this will save money in the long term by not having to send as many students out of the district to receive services.
The academic wing will connect to the existing main entrance, which will be home to offices, conference rooms and the school nurse.
“While the amount of square footage is roughly the same, the footprint of the building is much, much more condensed,” because the building is two stories, Johnson said.
Phasing
Although smaller, the footprint of the new school will overlap with the existing one. To accommodate the need to continue using the school while construction is underway, the project will be completed in phases.
“The beauty of the plan is that no services will be disrupted,” Johnson said.
Phase 1, scheduled to begin after April vacation in 2025 and be finished by December 2026, involves construction of the community wing next to the existing building, overlapping the soccer field. The fields to the left of the high school will be used as staging areas for construction and, for heating — the building will be fully heated and air conditioned — geothermal wells will be drilled in the rear corner of the site, opposite the baseball field.
In Phase 2, which is set to begin in January 2027, the portion of the building where the gymnasium and cafeteria currently are, will be demolished and the academic wing will be built in its place. A new parking lot will be created between the newly built community wing and the track, but Johnson said there will be less parking at the school when completed. Student parking passes will either be eliminated or be drastically reduced.
The existing industrial arts wing will be extended and become an early childhood center with 10 classrooms. The early childhood center will have a dedicated parent drop-off area, its own parking and a preschool playground. A greenhouse and foliage will separate the center from the main building. Kovacs said the front of the early childhood center will have a brick facade to evoke the appearance of “a quintessential schoolhouse.” The new industrial arts classrooms will be in the community wing.
Phase 3 will see the demolition of the remainder of the building and landscaping. The bus loop will be moved to the front of the building with entrance and egress onto Mill Street. Parents will enter from Cooper Street to drop students off and pick them up at the side of the building. Kovacs said this will lead to an improved traffic flow. The soccer field will be relocated between the baseball field and the main building, and the softball diamonds will be recreated near their current locations. The track field will be recreated over the geothermal wells.
The project is expected to be finished in November 2028. The project is time-sensitive, Johnson said, and delays in one phase could snowball, pushing the opening back by several months.
Several of the decisions were made with maintenance and durability in mind, Johnson said. Grass fields were chosen because they can be maintained with relative ease. There are pitched roofs wherever rooftop HVAC units are not required, both for traditional New England aesthetics and durability. Johnson said modern technology is not built into the classrooms so there is “the least amount of disruption as possible” when new advancements replace today’s state-of-the-art. There are also no lockers. Johnson said that about 20 of the approximately 1,000 lockers in the high school are used. He explained that much of the instructional materials are digital, and students prefer to carry their backpacks from class to class.
Johnson assured those gathered that the school would have cameras and a security system, although he refused to disclose the details to keep bad actors from circumventing them. He noted that community-facing areas can be cordoned off from the rest of the building.
An audience member asked about rooftop solar to offset utility costs. Johnson explained that to receive the maximum reimbursement, the MSBA requires that the school be solar-ready, but designs that include solar panels are not eligible for MSBA funding. He acknowledged the contradiction and said it has been included as a potential design alternate and there may be federal grants to help the town cover the cost.
Another person asked if the school is sized for the possibility that enrollment could increase in the future. Johnson told her that “exhaustive” demographic models were a part of the profile submitted to the MSBA when the town applied for the program. Enrollment levels are expected to continue to decline, allowing the school to serve Agawam’s population for decades to come.
