Steel girders for the community wing of the new Agawam High School rise into the sky. The new school is being built next to the current high school where staff and students have been working to reimagine the student learning experience.
Reminder Publishing photo by Mike Lydick
AGAWAM — Steel girders for the community wing — the first phase of what will become Agawam’s new, state-of-the art high school — have begun to rise into the sky next to the current high school where students and staff are transforming how students will learn.
Agawam High School Principal Jim Blain and Mayor Christopher Johnson gave presentations to the School Committee at its Oct. 28 meeting about the tandem endeavors. Johnson said the new school will introduce the latest technology while Blain explained how a new learning vision is being developed.
Johnson said the school’s leadership team has been clear that they’re striving for something that’s reminiscent of a college campus, something that’s not just a massive brick building. “What we’re looking for is something that has, frankly, timeless character.”
Blain said AHS is in the third year of a partnership with the Barr Foundation. A “Meet the Moment” grant from the Boston-based foundation has put the school ahead of the curve in reimagining the high school experience for students.
“We were told it’s a 10-year deal to really reimagine and to reinforce and to change the instructional vision of a high school and to implement it,” said Blain. “And we thought they were crazy — we could do this in one year. I’m learning that we’re in year two and a half, and their target for a long-term change was completely accurate.”
During the past year, Blain said the school’s instructional vision was rewritten. He said the goal is to connect the initiatives “to the work, so that we’re grounded in something important, which is to make students feel connected, valued and safe.”
Blain said the staff has been “knee deep” in data in different facets for the past two years. During the summer, he said that as part of the grant, teachers did an academic integrity survey to parents.
With the recent advent of AI, teachers want to make sure that when students do their work, they can’t use Google and can’t put it into ChatGPT. “We want it to be their work and nobody else’s,” said Blain.
He added that the staff also is trying to improve the efficacy, the frequency and the impact of project-based learning experiences.
Surveys showed that students and parents reported that the school’s Innovation Pathways program provides “excellent” opportunities for students. The program gives students experience in a specific high-demand industry, such as advanced manufacturing, computer information technology and healthcare through coursework and career-based internships at local employers.
“Our students have been helping to write the vision for instruction at our school, which I think is cutting edge,” said Blain. “It’s not normal, and it’s really impacting their voice within the building.”
Blain was one of the district’s seven school principals, along with the Early Child Center director, who recently made presentations to the committee about their action plans for students. But he also said that “all is not roses” at AHS. “We have to improve our communication regarding college and career readiness to all our stakeholders.”
According to Blain, a survey from Barr indicates the way in which the school is rolling out college and career readiness is not meeting the needs of all families.
“I can see where that’s true, even though we do our best. It’s a very daunting time for students transitioning from 14- to 18-year-olds and us sending them out into the world,” said Blain. “It’s not the easiest conversation to navigate. It’s not the easiest process to navigate. We need to improve that, to bring more families in in a different way, as opposed to one way. We have to work on a two-way pathway.”
Administrators and teachers are working to make sure they’re using real world skill development. Blain said AHS wants to get away from transactional learning, where teachers speak, students listen, teachers give a test. students perform on the test and they hand it back.
Blain said AHS is moving from a school where teachers talk for 43 minutes, students listen, take notes, get grades and move on with their lives. “We need to shift the cognitive lift within the classroom to make sure students are doing the majority of the work and that teachers are facilitating that work.”
In his update on construction progress, Johnson reiterated that the project to replace the current high school — originally built 70 years ago — remains on time and on budget.
“We don’t have any choice relative to being on budget because MSBA builds in mechanisms where they require the leadership team to be ahead of the curve and to be prepared to value engineer things out of the project,” he said.
“I’m happy to say we haven’t value engineered anything out of the project. We’ve prepared a list in case, but we haven’t had to do any of that yet.” He said Agawam is one of the few school districts in Western Massachusetts that has gone completely geothermal for heating and cooling in a new school.
Johnson said the leadership team will be back on the site in November, touching base with a lot of user groups at the high school, going through the areas of the building that they’re involved with to make sure they’re still on board with the decisions that they made.
With steel girders being erected and the last piece likely to be in place near Christmas, Johnson said the construction of the community wing will then begin in earnest. The building’s shell — with temporary heat — should be finished sometime in January or February. The wing is scheduled to be completed by December 2026, after which contractors will start the next phase of the building.
