Clarksburg School Building Committee Begin MSBA Process
CLARKSBURG, Mass. — The School Building Committee has officially begun the planning process with the Massachusetts School Building Authority and looks to go out to bid the summer of 2018.
Brian Laroche of owner's project manager Potomac Capital Advisors and architect Margo Jones told the committee Thursday they were recently on the phone with the MSBA setting up their timeline and submission dates and are aiming to have everything ready for a town meeting approval next fall.
"By that time, we have all the information we want to get out to the community like the cost, what we recommend and what has been approved by the MSBA," Superintendent Jonathan Lev said. "Hopefully by September or October, we will be ready to take it to a special town meeting."
Laroche the committee must keep up with a fast-paced schedule and by its January meetings have a draft of six or seven alternative plans to provide the MSBA.
He said currently they are in the discovery phase and engineers must survey the building and see what the designers have to work with.
"We are gathering information and understanding the possibilities of what the structure will allow us to do," he said. "Once we get all of that, we can really start looking at our options."
He added that they are supposed to explore a renovation, a base renovation, new construction or a combination of renovation and reconstruction. This includes locations for new construction
Jones, of Jones Whitsett Architects, presented the visioning findings to the committee. Earlier this month, an education planner visited the school and helped a group of parents, teachers and administrators figure out what they wanted in the building.
She said the specialist also presented them with 21st-century teaching techniques that could be facilitated by a more modern building.
"The economy of the future requires a different way of thinking than jobs did in the past so we are not just teaching kids how to be obedient and stay in line," she said. "We are trying to get them be creative and make things and be smart that way."
Principal Tara Barnes said teachers rated what types of learning they felt was the most important. Among the top scorers were project-based learning, teacher collaboration, cognitive diversity, multiple intelligences and learning space flexibility.
They also rated small group collaboration and social emotional learning highly but agreed that lecture and seminar style teaching was least effective.
Barnes said this informed the kind of learning space they want.
"We saw a lot of really great things about hands-on learning, building and making," she said. "All this dovetails into what kind of space we need to do this in."
Jones said a favored model was a "pod" model in whih different grade groups learned in classrooms or studios around a common area.
She said this allows corridors and hallways to become learning areas.
"Twenty percent of the space is corridor space, so 20 percent of your building is just really a passway for children to go," she said. "We can utilize that 20 percent of our building for learning."
Some committee members thought back to Drury High School before it was renovated into a more traditional structure in 2000 and were afraid open classrooms similar to the original high school could be distracting.
Barnes said these classrooms would be very flexible to allow all kinds of teaching scenarios.
"One thing that was really appealing was the option to open up and close, and we saw some designs where it was almost like a garage door," she said. "You open that and let the classroom flow into the corridor learning space if you wanted or you can shut it down ... I think it is about really about thinking flexibly about the space."
Lev added that there was interest in creating a large common are that the community could also benefit from.
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