"New High School will Feature Unique Components"
"Hanover - The paperwork has been signed and a date has been set for a groundbreaking.
Plans to construct a new Hanover High School have been on the table for years, and the go-ahead for the project was granted by Hanover voters in the fall. Now, with a signed agreement between officials from Hanover and the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA), money has already started to come in, and the project is slated to break ground in June.
“We’re going to have a beautiful, state of the art building,” Hanover Selectmen Chairman Dan Pallotta said on Monday, during a meeting with school officials.
In September, the Town of Hanover voted to approve the new high school at a special Town Meeting with an overwhelming majority of voters approving the project. The project also passed muster at the polls in a special election later in the month.
Since then, Hanover’s School Building Committee has been working with HMFH Architects of Cambridge and PMA Consultants of Braintree.
After Hanover voters approved the project, the School Building Authority gave the project the green light in November, allowing officials to sign off on the MSBA’s Pro-Pay “pay-as-you-build” system, which will allow the town to be reimbursed monthly as school construction costs are incurred.
Chris Martin, chairman of the school building committee, said the new 157,000 square-foot building would include a 533-seat auditorium, a gymnasium with two full-size regulation basketball courts and updated educational spaces.
He estimated the new building would open for students and staff in the fall of 2011, and plans to break ground for the structure’s septic system would take place this June. Construction on the building itself is set to begin in October.
“We have the money and it’s time to get excited about this,” Martin said. “Already we’ve put in for $900,000 for reimbursement and it should be coming in next week.”
Martin said Pallotta has been critical to the process, putting a face on the project as he visited the SBA offices in Boston regularly to keep the project moving.
“I don’t think we’d be where we are without Dan,” he said.
The new Hanover High School will be the first school to be built under the SBA’s new regulations, Martin said.
“It’s a good position to be in,” he said. “We lucked out that we got in before the groundswell of schools start this process.”
A view inside
Plans for the high school call for a centralized campus anchored by an open space cafeteria in the middle. The building will consist of three levels with most of the active learning sites, including shop, technology, the gym and theater sections all being on the first floor.
The second and third floors will hold a large bulk of the learning space in addition to a multi-tiered library, which will be incorporated into the center ‘open space’ through the use of windows and a balcony.
The entire school will be built where the high school’s current football field resides, allowing additional sports fields, parking lots and access roads to be built around the site.
“It’s a very tight site,” Dr. Kristine Nash, Hanover Schools Superintendent said. “We’re in between some wetlands and the Cedar Elementary School.”
The new school will be about 40,000 square feet bigger than the current high school and will be equipped for 800 students. Currently, the high school has 664 students enrolled.
“We’re supposed to build a school that will last for 50 years,” Nash said.
Because of the new SBA regulations, Nash said the process of building new schools has been streamlined as schools are required to be more cost effective, but in the wake of new guidelines, Hanover has had to be diligent in its work, eliminating potential frills.
“Their concern is that schools don’t overspend or buy unnecessary items,” she said. For example, Nash said the school building committee had to push for an extra 1,000 square feet so they could fit the two basketball courts in the gym.”
“It was a matter of about 10 feet all the way across,” she said. “We won’t be able to open the bleachers fully, but it’s our goal to accommodate youth groups so they can have two games side by side.”
Nash said the building would be different in that it has been planned based on the needs of students today as well as for potential students in the future.
Working together, a cross section of Hanover including parents, students, teachers, school administration and town officials came up with overlapping themes they wanted to see in the school including flexible space, a community connection and versatile learning.
Nash said the new cafeteria would be more like a town square than just a place to eat lunch.
“It is so big so it should be able to be used for more than just eating,” she said. “It will be in the center of the building and the library will look down on it from the second floor.”
At 4,900 square feet, including the kitchen, Nash said the café will be accented by a staircase, which will provide access to the abutting auditorium.
“I really see this as a hub,” she said. “Also, they planned the front doors so they would allow a straight away through corridor looking right into the cafeteria.”
Of the second and third-floor classrooms, Nash said the new setup would allow students to be immersed in learning and teachers to be able to work together.
“We call them pods,” she said. “And there are four of them over two floors.”
The ‘pods’ contain about three to four classrooms each, some with adjoining lab areas. All of the rooms are in square sets, pushed to the edges, which frees up larger corridors, which may be used for additional learning space, Nash said.
In the middle of the ‘pods’ are shared teacher rooms with bathroom facilities attached to the back.
In addition, each pod will have two science labs, creating eight in all.
Currently, Nash said school administrators are working with staff to decide how best to use the ‘pods.’
“Maybe we’ll put humanities in one or a science focus in another,” she said. Maybe, even multi disciplinary class or core classes. We’re still working on it.”
Teachers in the various subjects are to be grouped accordingly and will work out of the central share workspace.
While the new setup may take some getting used to by students and teachers, Nash said it would provide a better learning environment for all.
“I think it will force people to think differently,” she said. “Our focus was on how we work together to provide the students the skills they need in the future, to be problem solvers, collaborators while remaining tech savvy.”
“Students attending this school, it has been projected, will change an average of eight to 10 jobs during their career and we have to provide a learning experience that is ahead of the curve to deal with that,” Nash added. “We’re not talking about word processing any more.”
Clean, green design
While the school will not be LEED certified — the highest level of ‘green’ a building can achieve — it will be ‘CHIPS’ certified, a lesser degree.
“We’re doing all we can to apply for more green projects,” Nash said. “We’ll be recycling water, using a lot of indirect light and using displacement heating which will mean no more noisy vents.”
Displacement heating, which has been widely used in the Midwest and in California, uses fresh cool air that floods the floor in much the same way water would. The room heat sources (people) lift the air up and the air passes through the occupied zone and is exhausted at high level.
Moving forward, school officials have had to look at how construction would affect the next two school years.
The setback of the school, Nash said, made the designers look at moving school components around such as the track, which will surround the soccer and football fields when finished.
In June, when the new septic system is constructed, and then connected to the old school, the fields will be rendered useless.
“We’re going to have to tear down the maintenance building and the boosters club also,” she said. Nash said officials have already begun to work on a plan to deal with sports teams, as their home field will be unusable for the coming year.
“All our games will have to played away,” she said. “Many other schools have gone through this and we’re hoping to use their fields as we’ve let them use ours.”
She added that school staff members also looking at holding competitions at other schools around town.
According to Pallotta, town residents should expect to shoulder about $800 per household, annually, to cover the cost of the school.
“I think this time around, [with new regulations] the town will be forced to upkeep and provide routine maintenance to the school,” he said. “The road to this point has been long and arduous and we’ve gone round for round with the MSBA.”
Pallotta said the project’s funding through the MSBA would provide a benefit in savings to the new high school as well as upcoming projects all over the state.
He added that the partnership between the school building committee, the school committee, parents, teachers, students, staff and town officials has facilitated the opportunity to build a new high school, something he said Hanover desperately needs.
Renderings of the new building including floor plans can be viewed at Hanover Town Hall or on the school building committee’s website."