good evening again everybody good to see you uh Jason DeFalco the superintendent um and I have the privilege and honor of uh introducing some very important people uh with us this evening um you are all here because uh you clearly are
very plugged in to the work that we've been doing as a school building committee to help uh look at the feasibility of doing something different with the building uh that we're in currently uh the high school um and uh although a lot of those
messages and emails and things come for me uh I'm really just kind of the deliverer of the information um and a member of the school building committee but truly this project is a community project uh the schools belong to the towns I just have the honor and
privilege of doing my best to run them uh each and every day but these are your schools and so uh I not thank you enough for being here this evening to take uh really kind of the first step in what we're referring to as an educational visioning um aspect of our feasibility
study um I won't get into the entire timeline with the Massachusetts school building authority who is our funding partner in this project um but if there is anyone in the audience that is feeling anxious about any sudden changes in the school landscape as far as
construction if there's anybody that is anxious about any sudden changes in tax bills although that is not my specialty um please know this is an incredibly slow and long process this is more of a marathon than a Sprint we started this
project uh and I think it was 2019 2020 somewhere yeah somewhere around there okay so Greg will go through that um so uh please know this is a very slow and a very long uh project and process there will be no sudden moves so I want people that are maybe tuning in at home or
those of uh our friends in the audience worried about uh those changes coming too quickly uh but with that I'm going to introduce uh Greg SMY who is uh with dra Architects Greg has been with the district for quite some time and helped us with our um initial uh facilities
assessment of our overall school system that actually helped lead us to submitting our statement of interest uh for a new uh a new high school so Greg I'm going to kind of turn this over to you and you can walk us through our next steps thanks Jason I'm Greg SMY with Dr
Architects with me Jim Barrett and Angel Cadian who are principal in charge and project manager respectively and if I can get David to advance a slide I'll tell you where we what we've been doing he's eating pizza you had a job just Advance the
slide you know you bring the best people in and but they have a spe specific job they do it well so as uh as Jason said it's been a while we started actually in very late 2020 so we put it down as 21 and that was to assess the facilities
throughout the district look at the physical condition and start to determine what might be necessary to keep the buildings safe and code compliant and suitable for an educational use um we turned that study in and from that the district made some
steps forward in terms of how they were Staffing and positions that they had that are necessary in order for the state to participate in any type of funding of a project moving forward in uh 22 we undertook a districtwide master
plan and the master plan is where you take what you know from the facilities assessment the condition of the of the buildings to the Strategic plan for the district where the district wants to go educationally and you tie those two together so now we're looking at how how
appropriate are the buildings you own for the way you want to teach both now and moving forward coming out of that master plan in 23 we wrapped that up and the district put together what's known as a statement of interest and that gets
submitted to the mass School building authority once a year typically at the end of the year fourth quarter and by about the second quarter of the following year you find out of the historically about a 100 or so districts that submit about 12 to 14 10 to 14 get
selected and in 2024 um Blackstone milville was notified that they had been selected to move forward that's a um a big hurdle in the uh the legislative process or the regulatory process to get accepted in um
once we got to that point I I always say we because I've been through the district for so long that it's my district too now um once you get past that point you then have to put up your part of the funding and you have to create a building committee and a couple of other regulatory pieces and paperwork
to file in January the district hired what's known as an owner's project manager which is required in Massachusetts for anything that involves more than $1.5 million in expenditure and we hired K cers project leaders um
very well-known firm lot of depth lot of experience and very Adept at moving a project along and making sure that all the tees are crossed and eyes are dotted and things get done in January of this year uh Dr was retained we've been at this for as a firm for a little bit over
100 years and doing schools almost exclusively for about 65 66 years now um have built across the uh across the region not only in Massachusetts but but uh Connecticut Rhode Island and further north and
west uh we came on board and started into our work where' David go can you get me the next slide and I'm so demanding sometimes okay there you go so msba module one is funding the study that's
where you ended up in 2025 module two is hiring and and forming the team that's where I left off module three which is where we are now hence the green star and here we need to develop an educational program which is what you're going to be part of tonight and in this
you are helping the district to understand and helping us and David and everybody else involved and the design team to understand how you see education working and how it impacts the building that you build and will own the building that you're going to design and
hopefully construct has to be has to have a core structure that can work for 50 years this building was built in 69 and opened in 70 so it's 55 years so it gives you an idea what we're what we're looking at and then you go on to module
four after that which is the actual development of a preferred schematic design so at this stage we are looking at various options of what might work one of those will be selected by the build School building committee and the Board of Education as the preferred
schematic we'll develop that in module four and then module five is funding the program funding the construction that would be the beginning of 2026 you would most prob will we be doing that and then it would go into construction which in
this case we're allocating about three years a year for design and 18 to 24 months for construction so you would look at a building that would open in August of 2029 from a starting date back in 2020 so it's about a n-year
process and you're just coming up you're about hit or miss a year away from being asked to decide whether or not you want to fund the construction the project so on that if there's any questions on process because that's the last time we spend something this boring uh I'm going
to turn it over David Steven who will introduce himself and then we'll get into the fun of the night all right thank you all right good evening everybody yeah so my role on the project is what's called an educational programmer or planner and I am oh hi how
you doing I see I recognize you from the little box in Connor right yeah great great you could be with us um uh so my role as an educational planner is to help facilitate what we call a visioning process um that helps the architectural
firm you're working with Dr to get to know you as well as possible and to understand how to give you your best uh your best building solution and so um tonight what I wanted to do is to talk to you about the visioning that we've
done so far and to ask you to contribute your ideas and dreams uh for the school program and for the facility and so I wanted to we've done two out of three workshops with a group we call the educational visioning group and that
group has about 28 people in it and it's a range of people that are we have students we have a number of students we have teachers we have administrators parents and um and Community Partners and so um that group has been meeting
now for two times for two and a half hours each we did virtual workshops I'm going to share with you some of the highlights of the things that have been prioritized but it's really all about learning from you what you know what's most important for you so and just my
background I'm a school design architect and I work around the country but I think maybe more importantly I worked as a high school teacher for 10 years and an assistant principal for 10 years so I'm really interested in how the life of the school is really and and your Forward Thinking Vision about the
programs you want for it is supported by uh by the building that we can help you design and so I'll I'll talk a little bit about the um what what educational visioning is all about and how we've approached it and then I'm just going to start sharing some of the priorities and
I'm going to ask you to share yours and I'm just going to skip ahead right now to a slide that um this is um mentimeter this is an interactive program um for anybody that has a smartphone with them
or if you have a laptop with you um if you go to go take that QR code get that QR code that's going to bring you to the presentation that I'm doing right now and it will allow you to give your feedback on each of the slides because
I'm going to have a bunch of prompts that I'm going to uh feed to you and what's really nice about men meter is that it's completely Anonymous we don't know who is sending in what but we also get your thinking in your words and then we can look at all of the different
themes that are coming up and we can check back for understanding and say did we get this right this is what we heard these are the kinds of things that seem most important all right so when you get there um you'll see down below you'll
see a heart a thumbs up a thumbs down a question mark just hit either the heart or the thumbs up it's if you if you get to the page there you can see you can see we got like nine people now 11 um that lets us know that you're
there if you would prefer to give us your uh feedback uh analog or just like through there is Note Paper on each table and some pens so if you have at any point problems with mometer and just want to give us your feedback I'm going
to giveing be giving some very simple prompts you can always just like write it on the paper and just make sure that your writing is legible so we can understand it and transcribe it okay um anybody having a problem getting on here
yeah are we good are we good all right good so I'm gonna step back then um to a few slides just to give a little bit more context
so yeah so we are in module three um as Greg was saying and this is the feasibility study where we want to learn as much as possible about the district and what you value what you do now what you want to do in the future and so we
have this series of three workshops with a group we call the educational visioning group plus we do a community workshop and there will be more Community workshops and we uh did a faculty work shop this afternoon and may do another one next week um in addition
to that Greg and his team from Dr are going to be on the ground here working with the faculty to really get to know on a much more granular level what it is that is most important to them and how they do things on a day-to-day basis
this process is much more high level so we focus on the people and practices what do you do how do you support your families your students what are your practices now like what programs are most important for you how do you see them evolving um and I know a bunch of
you were here just now to hear Jill talk about the academic um and career Pathways that are pretty exciting uh taking place here so how can this building really support that Vision as well we also talk about design patterns I'm going to share those with you a
little bit later those are ways of thinking about space all of us went to school and we all feel like we know what a school is right it's it's a collection of class rooms and hallways and Big Ticket spaces like your cafeteria and your your gym and your
Auditorium but we really want to think about how do we use every square inch of a building to get you your most effective and flexible building possible that is going to last for 50 or more years and so um and then the last Workshop that we're going to do with
this group which is going to take place here in this room on March 12th we're going to actually do plans with the with this educational visioning group we're going to do plans of of how they imagine the school being laid out so the first
three workshops that we did with the leadership team and then with the educational Vision Group were all virtual and then um we did the the faculty and this community meeting today and then on on the 12th we'll do an in-person meeting as well as I said it's
a mixture of people we always try to get um a a a variety of folks involved in this conversation but it's just the beginning of the conversation so I really want to emphasize that nothing that we do here is set in stone this is
all trying to again learn as much as possible um we want to sort of encourage people to think outside of the box share ideas about what schools are are be are doing as they as they're what new schools are are looking like spark
conversations but it all comes back to what's important to you um we don't want to do something that's trendy uh we want we want to do something that's Timeless and essential and that really reflects who you are as a community now as part of this feasibility study and this is
really the 10,000 foot view right we're looking at the your educational and your architectural priorities and we're using those as lenses through which to look at all of these different options so as part of the agreement with the mass
School building authority we're going to be exploring either a Grade 9 through 12 school for 365 students or grades 8 through 12 for 470 grades 7 through 12 for 580 or grade 6 through 12 for 680 students so those
are the numbers that we're working with the the priorities that we're establishing are agnostic they apply to all of these and in addition to all of those different options we have to look at what if we just do a base renovation of the building what would that involve and how much would that cost how about
if we did a renovation of certain parts and then an addition for other parts or what about new construction and we're going to look at all of those models with all of those different numbers so there's lots of different Alternatives at this point that are going to be explored so we can come back to the
community and say these are the things that you know the considerations for each of these different options and what do you think so um we're going to be using Mentor meter in a minute and you'll see that we can um will be able to share kind of the thinking that's going on
here I realize this screen is a little bit small but you should be able to follow along on your on your phones if you're if you're connected um as I said nothing is set in stone this is like a brainstorming session so we want to encourage people
uh this is the time to be really aspirational there's lots of opportunities to make lots of compromises along the way um as we as we design go through the different design stages of this building so um if you are comfortable please uh share your name
and your role affiliation uh within the district we're just trying to you know keep keep track of who's participating in these meetings um so you just type it out and press submit still all right I'll leave this up for another
15 seconds in case you haven't pressed the button yet oh and I should say we're going to leave a half an hour at the we're going till 8 o'clock tonight and we'll be sure to leave a half an hour at the end for question and answers okay so so please
um save save your questions um uh until that time uh and um hopefully you know there'll be a lot of interesting stuff to look at in between so um now I'm going to ask to share uh your greatest hope for this project whatever that is
you know what what would you really like to see come out of this project sure a proper band room for music all right yeah yeah and also a field perform and a field to perform okay thanks
Margot for offering that and anybody should feel free to to voice what what are some other greatest hopes that people have and also you can be sure to share it here so we keep track of it anyone else want to share any of our
students I'm going to I'm gonna give you this oh that's my daughter's name to have like a better Auditorium better Auditorium okay like more up more updated better stage lighting stuff like that all right great thanks Izzy anyone
else want to share uh so some of the things in case you can't see them coming up here we've got um a new functional building updated learning spaces a sports Training Center I'm not going to read them all uh but we will be sure to keep track of them all uh modern learning facility promoting
Community work Sports and Fields highly efficient facility that will support all of the BMR programs I want to say that one of the things um that we definitely think about when designing schools now that we didn't think about before 50 years ago 55 years ago so much when this
building was designed is that the the school is a community center and that it is safely accessible after hours and on weekends and whole parts of the school can be completely blocked off from those other big ticket items that are really resources for the community like the
auditorium or the cafeteria or the or the media center or maybe some of your shop classes or things like that for adult for adult education um functional School structure that uh supports children and Educators
since Blackstone has a great music program I agree with the idea of a proper field with bleachers and flood stem labs and maker space so stem is science technology engineering and math Connor did you want to share something a larger welcoming area
okay so like at the L when you first come in yep we're going to think about that that's one of the design patterns that we look at like greeting and gatekeeping and what's your first impression when you come in how safe does it feel how do you know how to move through the
building or get to the main office things like that all right um I'm going to keep us moving along um but I'm not I'm not going to get to every one of those but because we have a lot uh a lot of prompts to share to to give you um so
this is um part of this process of visioning is that we're developing a narrative so as part of the mass School building authority module 3 requirements is that the District writes what's called an education plan and those are
like 80 page documents that detail all of the different things that you're doing now what you imagine doing in the future and how the spaces that you're requesting from the msba are going to support that so um so this is really a lot about developing the language for
that the msba has a space template it's going to look at all those different um sort of uh uh populations of students like 680 students it'll spit out a FR spreadsheet it knows exactly how big your cafeteria is how big your gym is
how many classrooms it's going to help you fund but how we organize those spaces and the push and pull and how we organize some of that square footage um there's a lot of creativity that we can uh sort of plug into there and we're going to build on all the good stuff
that the district has already been doing as Greg was saying and Jason this has been going on since 2019 we have the the um the facilities assessment the district master plan we also have things like your portrait of a graduate and your student expectations your academic
and CTE Pathways so all of those are going to factor into this conversation so I'm about to ask you three different I have three different prompts one is what your biggest educational priorities are in terms of the kind of programs that you envision going on here that you
think are going to be best for for your students what your greatest architectural priorities are in terms of either what SPAC is in the building or qualities of space or the kind of building you envision and then what your community priorities are as a community what's
most important uh to support your needs and before I ask you um the first one which is your educational I'll just say a few things so like a lot of schools um and districts um you have a portrait of a graduate that incorporates
what we call the five C's right which are higher order thinking skills so we know that Mastery of core academics is what it's all about but we also know that in order for kids to be more kind of proactive confident Learners we need
to give them the opportunity to practice be uh uh citizenship collaboration communication critical thinking and character so these are things that we know the school is really thinking about they actually all have implications on the on the building
level but we started looking at that we also started looking at the career Pathways that you have now and that you're envisioning for your future and how that plays into ideas about what spaces might be near each other and we asked your leadership team
and the educational Vision Group what educational Focus areas were most important to them and there was a lot of alignment in both groups they they listed like their top 16 and their top five out of their top six were the same student centered learning and this is
some of this is kind of education e right like education like every profession has its own language right so student centered learning means that it's not only the teacher that is in charge of the learning right uh Distributing the ideas and the learning that students are taking an active role
in constructing their own learning and they're engaged um academic and career pth Pathways so ways that the content that different subject areas come together to connect to kind of real world contexts and and and problems that
kids can solve or careers that they might be connected with handson and Project based learning this is nothing new but because of those five C's the only way to allow students to practice those higher order thinking skills is to have them actually do stuff not just
like passively but actively work on projects so Project based learning is something a lot of schools are thinking about Mastery of core academics is what it's all about and then College and Career planning um and and as I I know I was here at Jill's earlier presentation
and she was talking about some kids are going on to twoyear fouryear the military it doesn't matter we want to we want to make sure that we're showing kids what the options are and helping them find their best path forward and then the last one is deeper learning which is in addition to like AP which is
really great and which you have a good amount of here are there opportunities to go really deeply into something to really develop your passion and to to really get excited about about learning so those are some of the things that came up and um and then we also were
looking at with the group what are some of the benefits and the challenges if we really think about bringing the Middle School in and the biggest challenge to to to for for many schools going through this process is thinking about how do we
make sure we don't lose the Middle School identity and the whole experience of being a middle school student which is different than being a high school student so we think about having a completely separate middle school zone with shared amenities and really controlling how that interaction takes
place between middle and high school students at the same time some of the benefits that we discussed were well it gives you a new or renov complete completely renovated facility for all of your middle and high school students not just your high school students right
there would be fewer transitions there will be increased kind of extra academic and extracurricular opportunities for both high school and middle school students because you've got a larger population and so there's more opportunities and exposure to Career Pathways for middle school students
streamlining of special ed and administrative services and cost effic efficiency of sharing building and and Sy and your HVAC system so those were some of the things that came up and then one final thing before I ask you about your educational priorities um these are
just some of the highlights from the educational visioning group when we took all the different feedback we were getting these are some of the big picture themes that came up being safe and inclusive for all students um really supporting career Pathways and
preparation for future taking a holistic approach so it's not just about academics it's all that great extracurricular stuff as well including Athletics and art and performance and stuff like that um flexible and adaptive learning
environments social emotional learning which is a big educational term these days seal it's about kids learning to be part of a community and feeling a sense of belonging and ownership um core academic skills of course and skills-based learning
connected to projects Collaborative Learning and learning how to work in a team and extracurricular uh uh and presentation skills so with that I'm going to ask you to actually before we uh I ask you to um
to sort of record all the things that are important to you um just talk to people that are next to you for two or three minutes when you think about the things that are most important to you educationally what are the things that come up for you
okay okay let's take about 30 seconds to wrap up your conversations and in the meantime if you want to start recording some of your ideas I'm going to put this up so don't let all those good ideas go to waste make sure we get them recorded
here you can submit as many times as you want don't worry about spelling and I'll just tell you we are going to be having another slide for architect for spaces so I know it's tempting to talk about spaces here but
think about connecting it back to the kind of educational priorities that are important to you like Collaborative Learning as opposed to collaborative spaces type of thing spaces are fine no problem though and I'm just I'm not going to get
to every one of them I'm going to say a few of them as they come up so more bright and colorful uh Place movable plus comfortable chairs advanced technology we know that technology is going to continue to play an important
role Hands-On learning a must options for the future Collaborative Learning opportunities upto-date science lab cross-pollination between high school learners and middle school learners yep
interactive teaching allowing kids to be involved agricultural learning space for clubs and activities uh more deeper learning shop classes project and Competency Based skills uh or Competency Based learning
technology life skills learning options that fit the way the world has shifted and I think that connects a lot to the you know the work-based and skills-based learning that is seems to be very important to
people anybody want to share with the group any of the stuff that they're thinking about I'm going to press a button here and we'll see this is something I like about this program we can see all the different themes that are coming
up so we got a lot of stuff around Hands-On learning collaborative learning and spaces technology integration flexibility real life learning opportunities all right going to leave this up for another
60 seconds or so um while there's a tend tendency to think big let's not lose sight of small intimate educational classrooms where students feel support and safe to participate um yes so first of all you have a great teacher student ratio here
right which is really really something enviable um we want to make classrooms a little bit larger because it's not just traditional stand up and deliver teaching that's happening there we want to also be able to do small group learning there or move all the chairs
and you know do something more active um also there are oftentimes multiple adults in a classroom uh with par professionals or uh um Specialists that are that are also assisting in the classroom but at the same time we want to have intimate spaces we don't want
like just big we want to have quiet spaces where you can get focused so it's not all collaboration all the time by any means we want to definitely uh and and and we definitely want to create a sense of small school community so if we
do go in the larger 680 right now that for a middle high school that's not a huge number but it's different than what your kids are used to in terms of the numbers of students in the middle and high school so we definitely want to create smaller learning communities within that where kids feel a real sense
of being known and belonging right so um so those are all the things we're going to be thinking about okay so next we're going to talk about architectural priorities and I'll just say a few things some of the overarching themes
that we think about when we're designing schools these days is that your classroom is still the basic building block right but we're also looking at all the in between spaces because if a if a building is fully wired and this building will have a really robust
technology infrastructure then every square inch of the building can be used so we want to think about small scale Community large scale Community varied spaces that are active and quiet and how those spaces are connected together we
want to support Community use and we want to think about departmental versus is interdepartmental organization so a lot of middle schools have a inter interdisciplinary organization right they've got their middle school cross discipline kind of teams but a lot of
high schools are organized more that way now or at least not just all the science classrooms in one place all the math all the English and social studies because when you're doing more real life Project work that's not how it works right there's connections between those
different um disciplines so uh that's again we're going to be listening to you it's going to be organized as you want it but those are some of the things that we think about the other thing um I want to before I ask you what you want for your building I want to encourage you
not to get caught up in the weeds of things that any older building like this is just like really lwh hanging fruit right so so any new if you've ever done a renovation it's like this is like a gut renovation right new Wall Systems
new window systems uh new HV AC systems any newer renovated building is going to be fully ADA Compliant every space in the building has to be accessible it's going to be thinking about safe entry and security we know that's a big part of the conversation it's going to be
passive and active measures of security it will have cooling because we know that buildings are used throughout the summer now um as well as heating that works um and modern technology and furniture and that furniture is ergonomic it's going to be different
sizes to different bodies um well-sized classrooms with natural light you have a lot of classrooms here that don't have natural light that's a that's very difficult for teachers and for students and there's research that shows how it affects student performance um so we're
going to try and have natural light in all of the classrooms um and those classrooms will be slightly larger and and really agile classrooms and we'll also think about what we call borrowed light so windows from hallways into
classrooms always with a blind for a lockdown situation but so you can get some of that borrowed light inside to the interior of the school other things that we think about is special education needs to be distributed throughout the school unless it's a what we call a sub
separate program we want safe drop off and pickup where we separate pedestrian and bus and car traffic and bicycles uh there's going to be a high level of sustainability just by mass building codes now you have to achieve a lead
rating or what we call Mass chips um but we can go even further and a lot of a lot of buildings now are being are are Net Zero um or or net positive um distributed and gender neutral bathrooms we're going to be having more bathrooms throughout the school and some of them
will be gender neutral and all of your big ticket spaces like your calf your media center athletic spaces music Fine Arts performing spaces they're all going to be multi-purpose um so that they can be really used flexibly so this is really an opportunity to kind of think
big and think aspirationally here are some of the priorities that the that the educational visioning group talked about of course flexible agile classrooms collaborative and flexible learning environments student centered design we
talked a lot about branding and identity and kids being able to exhibit their work and really feeling a sense of ownership of the place like a blank slate that they can work on um performance and art spaces including
community and event spaces uh health and accessibility in general out connections to the outdoors sustainable features athletic uh improved athletic facilities better hallways and traffic flow and just general comfort and
functionality so I'll let you now talk to your neighbors about what's most important to you on the design front and then uh in a few minutes we can start recording them all right if people could wrap up your conversations in the next 30
seconds or so and start sharing uh on menter some of your great thoughts um I'm also just wondering because it is interesting to hear as a group what are some some of the themes that are coming up I know over here we were talking
about traffic flow right and drop off and pickup which is a bit of a mess right now and uh working on that other other themes that came up you can just yell It Out Security yeah yeah yeah and we're we're just that's something where it's
top of mind for all of us and part of security is also um what we call defa ideas about defensible space so that the building itself doesn't feel Anonymous when you're walking through it so that you have sets of adult eyes on you at all times and that there's
interconnection it's that informal supervision and surveillance yeah yeah other other themes all right so I'll list some of the things here A Creative maker space Labs um usable all day Outdoor Learning
space uh we've talked about that needing to be it could be like an outdoor classroom but we would also want shade or protection from the elements um athletic facilities I see a bunch about that a large gym potentially with
subdividers uh welcoming entry Community spaces more about outdoor multi-use spaces beautification and land Landscaping um a big theme that's come up in our workshops has been the courtyard and how much people love the
courtyard and want want the courtyard or some version of it or something maybe even larger so um we'll definitely be thinking about that wireless internet availability for sure more resources to make the school a community attraction
bathrooms near the auditorium C spaces for students library but not totally Technology based yeah libraries these days are really multi-purpose spaces they've got quiet spaces within them plus a really more space for
collaboration they they usually a breakout rooms and if you have that's often times where a stem program like your Project Lead the Way program here is located near uh near there as well efficient Heating and Cooling to lower operating costs solar defin l so
photovoltaics are part of the part of the equation or geothermal um we'll be looking at all that keeping the character of the buildings we talked a lot about Community aesthetic and the importance of what whether this is a new or renovated in new building um that that
that the aesthetic is something that really the community feels um belongs to them that they're proud of all right okay uh we got one more of the these prompts and then we're going to then we're going to dive into looking at
some nice pictures of different kinds of school environments so um this one is really more specifically about um what the community what's really important for the community and so for the educational visioning group these are the themes that have come up so being
accessible and usable by the community being able to block off whole areas Future Future Ready planning making sure we're doing this right so that we're taking into account that that the building is going to be able to accommodate the needs for decades to
come of the Community Pride and identity uh flexibility and security a whole continuing your whole Child Focus all kids can find things that they're passionate about here um spaces for community events integration with the
community lifelong learning opportunities which could be like Adult Ed classroom classes as well mentorship crossgrade interaction sustainability uh as connected to Gardens as well and showcasing like design display an exhibition of of
student work and projects so with that I'll have you turn again and you can talk to some new people in back of you that you haven't talked to yet if you want uhuh and uh share your ideas what's important for the community all right
folks let's wrap up those conversations and share some of your ideas up here so we can all see them so what do you think is most important for the community
all right so I'll I'll name some of the things that are coming up um the idea of a community hub where the community really sees themselves has an identity um serving as an entertainment venue with an auditorium for Community Dance and recital also place for the Boy
Scouts Sports Fields spaces outside uh like CPR training Scouts and sports uh showcase Student Success in sports band academics bringing Community inside the building in safe ways uh athletic space
that can be utilized by the community as well multi-purpose spaces for Community use yeah I'll tell you that um a lot of the times the CAF areas in our building when we get to the design patterns I'm going to show you we think of it as the heart of the school and these are really
beautiful spaces that are that are great venues for large Gatherings so a lot of schools are using them as Revenue generating as well they rent them out um as event spaces because and they've got great Acoustics and really nice Aesthetics IC so something to think
about uh a flexible space to build a sense of community involvement and pride clean easily managed space that can be maintained for over for over 50 years um safe and inviting encouraging
community's participation a community garden potentially with horiculture class in the school supporting after school programs yeah we think about that after school programming a lot of times one of the things that comes up a lot is about storage which seems like a very
you know just it's it's just a practical thing but it's very important locked storage and when you think about those after school programs that's what they need whether they're taking place in the cafe or in the gym or whatever um but also if you're doing a lot of Project based learning you need storage for
materials and if you're sharing classrooms you need locked storage for different adults to use the space um night events classes many auditoriums for Community sessions presentations Town meetings yeah we often think about having multiple kind of uh sort of
display uh presentation venues uh within the school not just the auditorium which is which is a much more anyway hierarchical and formal kind of way to do a performance so we can we can think about that as well all
right so we're going to jump now into talking about design patterns and um it's 7:00 I'm not going to give people a break here but if you need to get up and move around or use the restroom just feel free to do that we'll stop by 7:30
to open up for Q&A um and uh hopefully you'll all be able to see the screen here if you want to come closer please uh feel free so what we do in these workshops is we like to introduce a variety what we call Design patterns
just design approaches some of them you may really like some of them you may not like at all and that's the whole point is we want to expand people's ideas about what's possible show them uh most of the designs here I'm going to show you our buildings that have been designed and built in Massachusetts over
the last 5 to seven years school buildings and there's a lot of overlap between them two so it's all about defining that common language so what we did is we presented 36 different design patterns to the educational visioning group and we had to rate had them rate
them individually which I'm going to ask you to do as well because you can follow along these slides and at the bottom of each one wait a minute is out is a heart well you'll see the heart thumbs up or thumbs down or question mark So as I go
through the design patterns if you really like it put the heart or if or the thumbs up if you don't doesn't really do anything for you you put the thumbs down or if you don't think it's good for your context um if you don't really understand it or need more information you can put the question
mark you don't have to respond but it's just nice to have you all kind of interact with it so what I'm so first the slide I'm showing you here is we showed 36 different patterns and we had people rate them individually and that's on the left side of the list is the top
16 patterns so those are the things that in priority order of how people voted on the things that yeah the how many hearts and thumbs up they got on the right side after we introduced them all we had people get into breakout groups with five or six people and we had five
different breakout groups of five or six people and every time a design pattern appeared on a l they had to make a priority list of their top 10 to 15 patterns every time one appeared on a list it got five points so that then got
rated and that's the order of how it got rated in the small groups what's interesting is that out of those top 16 12 of them are exactly the same right so that's a lot of overlap between what people individually and what people
collectively thought was most important this isn't going to be the be all and end all of like the design for your school this is just gives us the tools to talk to your teachers and your administrators about and your community about what it is we're trying to do and what's important to you um I'm going to
show you the highest priority design patterns that were prioritized in the small groups and I'm going to do this um I have 21 I have three sets of seven so I'm going to go through each one I'm not going to spend more than about 30 seconds on each one if you want to
interact with it and put a heart or thumbs up or a thumbs down then it's always good for us to have a sense of what people are thinking um and then after every seven I'm going to give you the opportunity to tell us which one out of those or which ones you were most
excited about okay so first I'm going to move this all right so the first one and a lot of them are kind of no-brainers right but the first one is just welcoming arrival don't get caught up in if if you like
the design or not of the particular colors or the design whether it's too modern or whatever it's more like the the the approach so welcoming arrival means that there are Clear Sight lines that you know where to enter the building that it looks inviting uh that
it looks safe that there's a place to get out of the rain and the snow there's it's always nice to have some planting and some seaing and it's of course it's connected to a safe drop off sequence as well in a whole entry sequence um and then secure features we're going to be
thinking about security inside and outside the school one of the main things is having a secure entry right and one point of entry that is tightly controlled so you have a sense of when you're entering the building that yes it's people are people are watching here
we know who's coming in anybody nobody not any nobody can come in the building that doesn't belong here right so that that could be a double lock entry it could be uh uh if maybe if your if your student forgets their lunch you don't even have to go into the school there's just like a bank window and you can just
hand the lunch um maybe you have to walk through after the school is closed you have to walk through the whole administrative Suite to even enter the school um so all different ways that we can do it passive and active measures of security wayf finding and streetscape so
the idea here is that you're not just looking down miles of hallways lined with lockers that look very institutional and that all look the same right that actually as you're moving through the building there are places that have different identities different
color patterns views in and out of places nice Graphics um so it actually feels like you're walking through a community uh that has that has distinct identity and you can Orient yourself in the building now this is a big part of
um of Universal Design approach as well to make a building truly accessible because for people with different visual needs and and and Mobility needs you also want to make it easy to navigate through the building so many times we walk through school buildings and we have noide idea where we are and we get
lost it's very disorienting right um so you can use color pattern W views in and out of things uh to create Street Scapes Safe Community Access so this on the left hand side that's West Bridgewater Middle High School it's actually about
eight years old now and where you see that oval that's the gym the cafe the auditorium the band and they also have cable Access TV this can be completely locked off here and here after hours so
the whole academic Wing is completely unaccessible and you have an intact community center that is an incredible resource for the community um and that is you that's that's they definitely rent out that space uh they it connects to they also have a beautiful Courtyard
that's that um is used an internal Courtyard so Safe Community Access we can even think about a separate access point for the community after hours or it could be through the main entry uh where we block off other areas
wh agile classrooms that just means flexible classrooms we your classrooms are about 700 square feet here um and you have relatively small classes which is amazing small class sizes uh but the classroom sizes in a msba um high school
or middle school are generally between 850 and 950 sare ft so they're considerably bigger now we don't want to I got that comment about let's make it still feel intimate right but it also gives you a lot more flexibility so in terms of the kinds of things you do so
we'll we'll talk about that but other aspects of an agile classroom are modular ergonomic Furniture really good storage maybe sliding whiteboards and lots of storage in behind them sometimes we might have movable walls these are not the kind of movable walls that we we
might be used to like the accan ones or whatever where you can hear everything on the other side these have really good sound transm sound um uh qualities so they're really like a solid sheetrock wall they're expensive we wouldn't do that unless maybe we do it in a couple
of places because if you want to have for instance someone mentioned different performance venues how about instead of two 800 squ foot or 900 square classrooms you suddenly have 1800 square feet of space because you just open it up for an exhibition at night or for a performance or maybe you're doing some
team teaching an integrated project or something like that so we think about that kind of uh stuff in terms of flexibility Extended Learning areas these are what would otherwise be hallways hallways take up 30% of the square footage in you're building and they're generally useless and when we
walk through a lot of schools kids are actually working in the hallways but very uncomfortably they're just sitting on the floor backs against the wall on their laptops right so how about Furnishing those spaces maybe making them a little bit big bigger in some areas and having them connect to the
idea of a classroom neighborhood so it really has a sense of place now again we don't want to have big Open Spaces that aren't being used so we're going to make sure that we talk to you all about you know what what's going to what's appropriate for how many or where uh to
have spaces like this but this connects to the idea of classroom neighborhood so when we think about a hallway just lined with lockers and classrooms and the doors to the classrooms are closed and you can't see in that's a very
Anonymous this is West Bridgewater again and this is the Middle School portion of the school because it's a middle high school so the seventh and eighth grade have these learning neighborhoods because they work cross discipline and what you can see here is a team room a
small team room it's about the size of a classroom and then there's a teacher planning area these are all windows with views out into this area special education rooms and bathrooms so and then some small breakout rooms so you've got all these different spaces all
collocated it becomes a neighborhood and it takes on an identity so that's something that we think about it's like the sum is greater than the parts this one is more of a high school example where it's a little bit more like Google and some schools are going that approach where they have you know they might have
their Tech Lab their Project Lead the Way lab they have some breakout spaces where kids can use technology if we're trying to get kids kids to be more independent we have to be able to let them out of not out of our sight but
give them a little space to work more independently so that's those are things that we'll talk to you all about in terms of what's most appropriate um so that was the first seven so this is different than the other ones that I showed you because don't press the button until you're ready to to there's
only one chance here to submit so what you're going to see on your screens here is you can drag these and put them in different order based on what's most important to you so it's just interesting for us to kind of get a
sense of when you look at these seven that I just shared what's what stands out as like yeah that would be great to have so so again you should be able to see these on your screen and drag them and put them in order of what's your greatest priority once you have them in
the order you want them just press the button we're going to see a graph start to popul late here so we've had 11 people respond I'll leave or 12 now I'm not sure what our base is 14 we'll leave it up for another minute
or so right up at the top secure entry and Safe Community Access welcoming arrival and then kind of all kind of equal to each other Extended Learning wave finding agile classrooms we're going to be thinking about all of these things it's not like
by rating them higher again we're just trying to get a sense of what people are most excited about all right are we ready to move on to the next set I I think it looks like everybody's okay all right so step
number two um breakout and quiet spaces so um we some of those spaces might be breakout spaces that are like Extended Learning spaces that are more open some of them might be more like a conference
area or here's a breakout space between two classrooms um that are shared by two classrooms or just a conference room um or you know a small group room and we definitely put more of these into
schools than we used to um because it's a great space for testing for um for deescalation if a kid is having a really bad day uh for doing small group work for for meetings uh for individual
education PL IEP meetings um so uh definitely thinking about spreading those throughout the school to give you more flexibility about the type of spaces that you have access to the heart of the school um so often
you go to a school and there's no there there right so often times especially um when we're doing a new school we like to have a a a space that's really centrally located that feels like the heart of the school it's like the Town Square It's usually the
cafe the cafeteria right that's a multi-purpose space but it's also maybe surrounded by other things and and um it's where you build whole school Community uh it's also where you might have larger Gatherings or um events at
night things like that so um people in the educational visioning group rated this one very highly they really want like the idea of a heart of school the media center learning Commons also got rated very highly um and as I
said media center learning Commons is now a place for books and for also um more collaborative work so quiet work collaborative work access to technology breakout rooms um so we we we want to
see a variety of different ways that that space can be used enrichment spaces uh these are all your spaces like your you know your art your music your your weight room your your gym uh your performance spaces um
oftentimes we think about uh blackbox theaters and performance spaces that are really flexible uh in Middle School environments and uh we want to make sure that these enrichment spaces to whatever extent possible are very centrally located so you don't have to walk from one end of the school to the other so
when we do a new school what we often do is we have this set of core spaces at the middle and then all of the classrooms kind of radiate around it right that's kind of the the spoken wheel um uh framework Career Tech
education now you you don't have chapter 74 programs like Blackstone Valley but there's definitely an interest in the Career Technical um programming uh that you you that that exists here and that
um the school would like to develop so um so we'll be thinking about that and we also want to be thinking about spaces that can be used flexibly as well in the future if those career Pathways Evol as they evolve in different ways as careers
evolve um we want to be able to make sure that they can be used used in some different ways stem Steam and maker spaces steam is science technology engineering art and math so it's just like a a very interdisciplinary approach to doing
engineering design it's like the Project Lead the Way program that you have here um and oftentimes those spaces are just like big table surfaces with a lot of storage around the perimeter uh for the materials academic CTE Pathways this is
kind of like the classroom neighborhoods we saw um but just thinking about well if you're going to have these career Pathways maybe those lab spaces should be integrated with your classroom spaces in a way that makes sense so that they're
collocated um in a way that they become um sort of their first of all there's adjacencies that make it easy to collaborate but also they have a certain identity as a as a career pathway so that was that set of
seven so we can rate these then we just got one more set and we'll open up for Q&A for all right so well lot of a lot of people like a lot of different things but heart of school kind of taking the lead there at the top stem and
steam and then kind of even you know uh for Career Tech media center and Richmond breakout all right and a lot of these are very connected to each other as we said so I'm going to do
one more set outdoor connections and learning um so that could be a courtyard it could be an outdoor classroom um the lower left-and picture there shows a garage door from a maker space that goes right
out into an outdoor platform where you can do build some larger projects um maybe there's a garden um more informal areas for students uh to converge um maybe areas for dining
outside and biophilic design is sort of connected to the outdoors but it's more the bringing the outdoors in through views to Nature uh or the use of natural materials or Graphics um a lot of times we see those big planters and stuff like
that lots of greenery um but we can think about wood and natural materials um and there's a lot of studies that show too that this is a very calming thing for for uh for students and and and teachers and
increases uh student performance anywhere anytime learning the idea that it's not just in the classroom but learning can happen outside it can happen in these uh sort of more informal areas um there are areas throughout the school where small
small groups can work and gather um and um and the whole again the whole campus every square inch of the building becomes a learning environment but also knowing that there needs to be supervision so you know that's um and teachers are very
conscious of that so there needs to be visibility so part of connected to anytime anywhere learning is that there's a good amount of transparency in certain places where you can kind of make sure that you're monitoring what's going on display and exhibition 2D 3D
display um not just of athletic trophies are great and and we want to we want to have a good place for those but also let's display artwork let's display academic work um and really kind of celebrate the learning that's going on
and so that again the the idea that the school becomes like a blank slate and there are lots of venues for display branding and identity um you don't have to like this particular aesthetic this is actually a school in Los Angeles that has it's a
Communications design and and and science three small high schools all collocated they each have their own color scheme and and materials palette um and identity uh you can use Graphics to do that as well um and it's something
that when we think about renovating a school and giving it a facelift that's also something we think about is using color and patterns to do that Community aesthetic um not to say that this is your aesthetic but we'll think we'll talk with you about what is what is
appropriate uh for you both interior and exterior aesthetic what's going to really feel like wow this belongs to uh to the community and we can relate to it and feel proud of it and lastly effective Storage storage
for students and storage for teachers uh within the classroom um and we definitely rethink are rethinking how lockers are done and a lot of your lockers they're so here they're so they're so narrow they're not usable right so if we do have lockers
oftentimes it's the athletic lockers that are used the most and oftentimes in high schools we just have itinerant lockers where kids can use them if they need them but not every kid is assigned a locker right so so that's one possibility but the thing about lockers
is they take a lot of space and they're very institutional and they're really expensive so we want to think carefully about how we approach that with you uh so that's it that's the last set it's like outdoor connections and learning right up at the top Community
aesthetic display an exhibition all right leave this up for another 15 seconds I think we had 21 last time okay there we go all right I have two more slides before we close uh and open up for a Q&A
um please share your personal favorite design patterns here um and you should be able to see a list of all the things that I just went through so oh wait a minute before you do that let me see if I can
okay this is going to be better it'll be word cloud so the way word clouds work is um you need to make sure that you're spelling it correctly and if you want it to get bigger you need to use the exact same spelling as the other people when
you see a word come up it gets bigger the more times that you do it someone's interested in stem yeah and you can make up your own design patterns here too you don't have to use the list that I gave you all right well you can see the ones that
have gotten bigger maybe not the smaller ones right so C entry Community outdoor connections Safe Community Access welcoming Arrival all right leave this up for another 15 seconds or so and then I have one other prompt
which is so you can start thinking about it if you finish with this and that is to share one or more Blue Sky aspirational ideas something that you would love to see in this new or renovated building and it could be a space or quality of space the type of
how what you'd like it to look like how you'd like it to feel um or particular spaces and you can be as aspirational as you want here uh no holds barard all right so we'll and you can share more than one if you
want so more more Club areas and water features pride of community military recognition wall for graduates Athletic Complex visual accessibility multi-use Sports space
football sta football stadium electric shop class Athletic Complex turf fields Stadium setting with lights and adjacent locker [Music] rooms better water fountains
labs for Hands-On learning community space with Garden state-of-the-art occupational therapy physical therapy and speech room you will definitely have that a filtered water
system all right okay so um I think we're going to wrap we're going to wrap this up but feel free to keep riffing on this if you want add as much as you want we're going to wrap up
and open up for Q&A I I did realize Jim I thought maybe you and Angel could just introduce yourself because they're part of the design team and you're going to see see them oh you you introduced oh you did I'm sorry I was busy eating pizza that was and and not doing my job
right all right so um thank you for I hope that that got you a little bit excited about the potential here those were mostly schools that have been designed and built in Massachusetts um I will say that um there I do work all around the country and there is no other
state that is as thoughtful as Massachusetts in doing their new schools and to get into the msba system um is really great great and to get into their pipeline to have them as a funding partner because they've got a lot of experience and they're willing to do
really creative stuff um so all right um questions yeah actually Okay g um I actually have two quick questions um the first is actually probably a
budget funding money question um it it came up a lot in the slides that people are looking for a Athletic Field maybe multi-use field stadiums locker rooms is that typically looked at with building funding or like as as far as
you know field Renovations or anything external to the building would funding something like that be included in the monies that we're getting from the state and and anything like that to update or build a new building or would that have to be looked at as a separate funding
project the the the state program allows a certain percentage of the budget for site work so depending on what it is that you do it would fall under that it doesn't use the same uh percentage as the building
itself so there is um there's few limitations on what you can build there is a limitation on how much they will contribute to it did you you have a second question or I did okay TR you so and and the second one I know is
probably going to be more along the lines of detailed design and layout and schematics but another two big topics that came up uh one was Secure entry and then the other was outdoor educational spaces so I guess my question there is
if you could just briefly cover some of the ways that you can address both a a secure entry secure campus you know secure facility while at the same time having those outdoor spaces how maybe some ways you've addressed that because
in my mind looking at a very secure entry and then having a big Pavilion out back where people can just walk around the school and go out back seems to be counterintuitive so um just nothing nothing real detailed just high level the um the basic approach is to
have an accountability for everyone who comes onto the campus and where they make go so it's not a matter of not having doors in and out of the building it's a matter of knowing when the door has been opened and when it's been closed and to a finer degree who opened
and closed it so you could have a classroom that is down near the outside field and that teacher would call into the main office and say I'm going to take my class outside their classroom door would open it would show up on the computer the door would close and they would go out if the door were jammed
open or PRI open open so that someone else could get in it would sound an alarm in the main office as far as the campus itself goes this campus actually doesn't work too badly for that because your main entry by vehicle is at the front where this campus falls down a bit
is you can't really connect visually with the front so we we follow what's called Community protection through environmental design seped is is the acronym for it the back part of the campus can be secure through fencing and through well the stream helps crossing
the stream is difficult you have a residential piece along the back there's the way to get access to this campus through the main entrance and then to the back would have to come through the building so we would design the campus and integral with the building more of
them was done when these were originally designed this was set up the fields were down there you could access them out of the other neighborhoods and you could come in and out now our approach is to make it a single point of entry that can be controlled during the school day I would say also just to add to that uh
that West Bridgewater example that I that I showed has that interior Courtyard and where they have the garage door from the robotics lab that opens up into the courtyard it's all internal um and they actually encourage students to navigate through all those doors are
unlocked in the in the interior Courtyard and they encourage students to use it even during the winter like walk to to and from classes to get outside um also along with we talked about secure entry but there wasn't anything about Security in the
classrooms or anything is that stuff that's already like built in with all schools going forward they have to meet XYZ standards for security in the classrooms or is there talk about what that would include I'm not entirely sure where you're at
but if it's in terms of shelter and place there are there are design approaches to Sheltering in place the um the the main thing is to make people who are responsible for the classroom responsible for the classroom in a lockdown situation so you try to avoid a
having to go and lock the door put the phone where someone can get to it where they can't be seen from the door have a place where the class can shelter in place that's away from the door um the hardware that's used on doors and schools now is set to always be locked
from the hallway side and always openable from the inside so depending on what your response is you can get out of the classroom if you need to or you can shelter in place and be safe um communication now has takes a number of different protocols either um cellular
or over a hard wire virtually all the schools now have a lock down call that goes immediately to the police department and all of our review as we go through the design involves the police department and their second responder so if it's the state police or another local police they're involved in
in the response planning and response planning also includes the fire department and the emergency um medical because the last thing you want is for someone to block up a driveway have an emergency fire truck respond and then have an incident inside the school where
the police don't know how to get past that incident so it's it's a fairly comprehensive planning and it's gone all the way up and been Incorporated at State legislation level between msba and the state legislature and the state police have talked about how best to
program this um it's also an area that as we get further into it you won't see it happen we don't publish that in public for obvious reasons everything else about this process you'll find except the security for the school anybody
else no there you go thank you um so I I have a question about like the building itself so in the beginning of the slides when you guys had shown um if it were 9 through 12 or 8 through 12 whatever and those numbers
they seem very small um for like it was like 300 and something student students for four grades um my concern with this is is there any type of study or was there any type of study done to like somewhat forecast what we think grades will have
as far as enrollments only because um I know Franklin they had built their new school and their first year the kids couldn't even all fit in the cafeteria so it's like if we're going to spend all this money you know you know we want to make sure our kids have room in the school so I'm just curious on that sure
when we did the master plan we did a demographic and enrollment study and you do demographics in addition to enrollment because demographics tell you how the towns are growing and enrollment tells you how the schools are trending That Was Then updated you guys
updated right updated it submitted that to the state and you've now exceeded those updated numbers so they do seem small and we are well aware of that as is Jason's team and as is um uh coler's um so all the team members are aware of
that and we are formulating a strategy to start to talk to the state about that um the state has a tendency to be a little bit hard of hearing on this aspect so the sooner we start the better off we'll be but yeah we are definitely
aware of that great so on the 8 through 12 the gr span 8 through 12 we're listed at 470 kids that's what's in here right now we have about just under 540 so there's already you know a 60 70 student difference on the plus side so to that
point we're we're engaging with msba again to look at that and I just feel people more csed and things like that like younger families coming in so like by the time our kids get to this High School are they I'm not even going to try to top
that one there there is that if you build it they will come and they do I thank you all for coming out this is as uh Jason and David said not not the last time you'll be asked to uh to engage in the process as it moves along
so um keep in touch with everybody you can certainly reach over to uh Central Administration let them know what you uh what you want to do and I do know that um unbeknownst to to Jason I had offered that if someone wanted to walk through the school either reach over to your office or to jails and see if you can
take a walk through the school if you're uh interested in what a 55y old high school looks like come back and take a walk through thank you all