AGAWAM — The School Committee recently got an update on the progress of the new high school project, one of the town’s largest capital improvement projects in decades.
At the committee’s Sept. 10 meeting, Mayor Christopher Johnson said the project has already gone through the schematic design phase, establishing the building’s basic footprint, which was approved by the Massachusetts School Building Authority. The town is still waiting for the signed project funding agreement to come back from MSBA, which he said generally takes a while.
According to Johnson the project is now “well into” the design development phase.
“It’s really the meat and potatoes of coming up with what this facility is going to look like — both inside and outside,” he said.
Johnson, who also serves as chair of the School Committee, said design development is where every aspect of the facility is fine-tuned by a leadership team that consists of the mayor, the school superintendent, the town procurement officer, the building maintenance director, the high school principal and representatives from the architects and the owner’s project manager.
The team meets regularly, with meetings often lasting for hours as the group goes through various designs. At one meeting, Johnson said the team just talked about bathrooms — in extreme detail — including their configuration and where they will be located. Another meeting was spent discussing what the cafeteria will look like, what the layout will be and the type of seating it will have. The basics of the auditorium and the Early Childhood Center also have been discussed.
Another session concerned where projectors and screens will be located around the school, as well as athletic fields and parking.
“This is getting into the detail of how exactly the facility is going to be laid out, how it’s going to operate and what kind of materials we’re looking at,” said Johnson.
“What’s going to happen next is that the leadership team is going to continue with these meetings. Then there’s going to be what’s called constituent meetings,” he said.
Now that school is back in session, Johnson said constituent meetings are much easier to schedule. The team will bring in staff from each particular area to again look at all the details of how the space will be laid out and how it will function.
The project is midway through the design development process, which is supposed to be completed in December. According to Johnson, once design development is done, the next phase is to start preparing construction drawings.
“That’s about a five- to six-month process for the architects and all the support teams. Then we begin the sub-bid process with a projected groundbreaking next spring into summer and construction starting on the community wing next year,” he said.
The mayor said design development is the most critical part of the process.
“What you don’t bake into the details during design development now costs considerably more to bake in later. The concept is that — hopefully — we’ll have as few change orders as possible as the project moves forward.”
He explained that the team spent hours one day just looking at the basic design of the ECC and talking about where doors, closets and copiers will go, so architects and engineers doing the construction drawings have as much detail as possible.
He said the team is trying to figure out “how many bodies” are going to be in each area of the building, because it will affect the capacity of the heating and cooling system. The primary heating and cooling, at least for the main part the school, will be a geothermal system.
Johnson told the committee that there also has been discussions about what portions of the building might be “taken offline” during the summer months. The building’s academic wing will have three multi-level learning pods, and he said there’s “virtually no circumstance” where all of those classrooms will be needed during the summer months.
“Summer school is probably going to be located in one of the pods, but that all goes into the calculations regarding capacity for heating and cooling in the building,” he said.
A test well was dug beyond the softball fields — the area where the geothermal well field will be drilled — but final data on that test is still pending. Johnson said initial test results were “very positive,” so it may be possible to extend the system to also serve the ECC, even though the original plans didn’t call for it to be heated and cooled by geothermal.
School Committee member Catherine McDouagal asked if special education representatives will be included in constituent meetings.
“We have many inclusion teachers and teachers who move from one setting to another throughout the day. I want to make sure there’s some kind of representation at the table to be getting that input,” she said. “We want to make sure the space for inclusion students is the best fit for them.”
Johnson said the special education space is one area that’s already “cast in stone,” because it had to be approved separately by the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education.
School Committee member Michael Perry told Johnson that when he’s out in the community, people ask him questions about the project and many times he has to tell them he doesn’t know.
“It’s not a good look,” he said. “So, I really appreciate the update. The information you shared tonight has been awesome. I hope you’ll give us periodic updates like this.”
Agreeing with Perry, committee member Shelley Borgatti-Reed said the committee is “the face” of the public.
“They come to us and it really doesn’t look good when we say, ‘I don’t know.’”
Johnson said he plans to provide the committee with monthly updates on the project.
