Spotlight Jan/Feb 2008 – A Community Campus

Photos by TJ Hass Associates
LAWRENCE, Mass. — The last time the City of Lawrence, Mass., opened a high school was the fall of 1867. The nation was just recovering from civil war. Cars and radios hadn’t been invented, let alone smart boards and wireless technology. Organized under a plan by renowned educational reformer Horace Mann, the stately yellow brick facility, with its sturdy oak doors, terrazzo floors and marble wainscoting, was state-of-the-art for those simpler days.

Although the sturdy façade still offers a glimmer of a golden era, Lawrence High School presented countless challenges. Greatest among them was the fact that more than 2,500 students traversed narrow, locker-lined corridors meant to hold no more than 1,500. Other challenges included a leaking roof, broken pipes and aging infrastructure ill-equipped to accommodate modern technology. Students practiced track in the hallways and had to be bused to playing fields to participate in sports. Off-street parking for staff was limited, given the school’s urban location. With 33 exits to contend with, the task of keeping students in, or strangers out, was daunting.

Citywide poverty posed another threat. Although Lawrence , located along the banks of the Merrimack River , had once been a thriving mill town, the mills had long ago been shuttered. The city became the second poorest community in Massachusetts .

“Eighty-seven percent of our students live in poverty,” says Wilfredo Laboy, Lawrence Public Schools Superintendent.

In the midst of so many challenges, Lawrence lost its academic accreditation over issues that included high rates of failure, dropouts and absenteeism.

The new arts center features an orchestra pit, side balconies, mechanical dropdowns for scenery changes and a curved proscenium.

“Staff was demoralized,” Laboy says. “College acceptance for our students was rare. We needed an educational transformation. We needed to create an environment that said, ‘Look at what a good education looks like.’ Our students saw what students in other districts had and wondered why their facilities weren’t as nice. There was no doubt in my mind that our physical space needed to support our educational transformation.”

Where would construction dollars come from? A new school had been proposed in 1998, but was mired in a lengthy approval process. Critics said the goal of creating a new facility was both unrealistic and unachievable.

Despite the opposition, the new school campus opened to great fanfare in September 2007, with the help of a combination of state and city funding sources. Located on a 42-acre site, the 565,000-square-foot brick- and zinc-clad facility houses six small, distinct schools whose connected buildings afford easy access to shared common areas such as a cafeteria, field house, performing art center, health center and media center.

“Initially, the district planned to create a separate 9th grade academy,” says Mary Lou Bergeron, district assistant superintendent.

Instead, the school system opted to create six separate, thematic schools, divided not by grade, but by learning themes such as health and human services and math, science and technology.

Flansburgh Architects’ design returns to life the city’s rich history. Individual school wings serve as a reminder of the city’s old mills, while the curved zinc cladding represents the Merrimack River along whose shores the mills once thrived.

While the total school population will remain more than 2,500, each student now attends a school with a population of no more than 500 students.

Shared common areas include a media center, cafeteria, field house, arts center and a health center.

“As the program evolved, we altered the design to reflect the programmatic needs of the stand-alone schools,” Bergeron says. “We realized in one school, for example, that a classroom needed to be converted into a computer room, while in another school, the design simply needed to accommodate more computer access.”

The differences between the old and new facility are like night and day. Security, easy to breach in the old facility, is taken seriously. Each student has a security card that they use to gain access through the main security entrance. There are more than 300 security cameras scattered throughout the facility to monitor student activities and keep outsiders from entering.

“While the student population hasn’t increased significantly, the new facility is about five times the historic school’s size,” says Peter Collins, project manager with Heery International.

For the first time, students have their own professional quality performing arts center, complete with features such as an orchestra pit, side balconies, mechanical dropdowns for scenery changing, cherry-paneled lobby and curved proscenium. The center seats approximately 1,300. The field house, with its parquet floor and indoor track, seats 3,400. Other features include the 150-seat lecture hall and four day care centers to help the district keep teen mothers in school. The cafeteria offers bright, warm colors in an atrium-style setting. Seniors have the luxury of separate seating.

“We used to have five lunch periods, the first of which started at breakfast,” Laboy says. “Now that the cafeteria accommodates more students, we have only three lunch periods.”

The facility’s infrastructure also accommodates numerous computer classrooms.

“The new facility boasts 1,600 computers,” Laboy says. “We had only 120 in the old facility.”

New science laboratories bear little resemblance to the older school’s inadequate facilities.

“Teachers used to leave the room to get water from downstairs for their experiments,” Laboy says. “Now they’ve got prep rooms, fume hoods, ample storage and dishwashers for washing and sterilizing. In fact, all teachers have their own rooms. In our old facility, teachers traveled from room to room. How do you create a positive learning environment when it’s not yours?”

Twelve-foot-wide corridors ease the flow of student traffic in the main corridors and individual wings. Lockers, once considered hallway obstacles, are now located in individual school wings. A centrally located stairwell and elevator provide easy school access. Each wing also has its own paging system.

The high school’s main corridors are 12 feet wide, allowing for heavy student traffic between classes.

“This was an enormous school to build,” Collins says. “The original time frame was 1,095 days from the notice to proceed to substantial completion. In addition to typical construction challenges, we knew we had to carefully coordinate schedules to account for harsh New England winters.”

One of those milestones involved moving a homeless shelter to a new site in a timely fashion.

“The city needed to find the right neighborhood to relocate several trailers that comprised the homeless shelter,” says Tony Pruner, Heery project director. “Part of our role was communicating with all stakeholders and keeping the shelter move on the front burner. Ultimately, we helped select a relocation contractor, lined up moving services, and helped in the physical move, re-installation and repairing the facilities to ensure they were up and running by Thanksgiving 2006.”

In Collins’ mind, one of the more difficult aspects of the project was the construction of the performing arts center.

“It was difficult to frame, measure and construct the theater’s stepped-out walls,” he says.

Creating access to install the step- down ceiling, placing the lighting, and installing the HVAC ducts were all difficult tasks. Difficult, too, was getting all systems in the performing arts center and throughout the school to work together.

“In case of fire, we had to make sure the fire safety system overrode every other system,” Collins says.

Of course, coordinating the theater and communication proved to be minor tasks compared to that of helping to hire a new contractor as the project approached completion.

“The contractor went bankrupt as we were nearing 85 percent completion,” Collins says. “Suddenly, despite having been on-schedule, the project came to a grinding halt. Our team studied the work that had taken place and helped the owner put together a list, a credit value of the work that had been completed to date. Not only did we want to enable Lawrence Public Schools to get what was due from the surety company, we wanted to get the project back on track.”

Working with the school system and its attorneys, Heery helped bring a new contractor aboard. With six months lost, the team kicked into high gear to complete the school for a fall opening.

It’s no surprise to Laboy that students appear eager to be at the Lawrence High School Campus.

“Our attendance rate used to struggle somewhere between 80 percent and 85 percent,” he says. “This year, we’re already over 95 percent. That’s just by creating a place where kids want to come, where they feel valued. This campus is about leveling the playing field for our students, showing them the opportunities that exist through education. Our goal is to create an environment to get our students to college. We may not be where we want to be, but we’re sure not where we used to be.”