School Bd Hears New 5/6 School Proposal

By Jeff White

A large number of town residents including First Selectman Herb Rosenthal, three Legislative Council members and several teachers joined the Newtown Board of Education Tuesday night to hear the “conceptual design” proposal for a new fifth- and sixth-grade school by architects Jeter, Cook and Jepson (JCJ).

The Hartford firm’s proposal would involve building a new 162,783-square-foot, $32.8 million school on the town-owned 20-acre parcel of land at Fairfield Hills where Watertown Hall now sits.

JCJ architect Jim LaPosta told the school board that the purpose of the conceptual design phase was to focus on “the big picture items,” such as the development of building and site plans, identifying major building systems and preparing a conceptual budget. “It was a chance for us to get familiar with the project,” Mr LaPosta said of the study.

Three roads would border the proposed school: Wasserman Way to the south, Trades Lane to the east and Old Farm Road to the north. JCJ decided to place the potential school site to the east of the existing ball fields on a slightly raised patch of land in order to make the most of water drainage while keeping the playing fields intact.

Mr LaPosta presented a potential floor plan arranged in two separate pieces: “academic houses” and a “core area” that both buttress a media center, which forms the school’s nucleus.

There would be two academic houses, “House A” and “House B,” both comprised of two stories’ worth of classrooms and laboratories. JCJ’s planned school would have a total of 44 full size classrooms, grouped in sets of two-room “clusters,” each sharing a small project room. Each house would be independent of the other, with its own access point and bathrooms.

 Laboratories likewise would be grouped in pairs and would serve a function connecting the two academic houses.

The school’s “core area” would be comprised of those facilities common to both fifth- and sixth-grades: a cafetorium, gymnasium, administrative offices and rehearsal rooms. The “core area” would be accessible to all students by what Mr LaPosta called the school’s “Main Street,” a hallway that would run the length of the building.

The cafetorium would be sized to allow the entire student body to eat lunch in two seatings, while remaining large enough to accommodate 950 students for school performances.

The gymnasium and adjoining locker rooms would be two of the few areas that would exist below the ground floor of the school. Their location would still be strategic, allowing easy access to the adjacent playing fields and offering a separate access point for community use.

Externally, JCJ’s design calls for separating student traffic from the general traffic a school might generate from faculty and visitors. Mr LaPosta proposed a separate bus and service driveway on the north side of the school, which would be sized to accommodate an additional 50 cars should overflow parking ever be needed. Parents, visitor and staff parking and access to the school would be located on the south side of the building.

JCJ plans to increase the number of athletic fields for the 5/6 school, maintaining one large baseball field, two smaller softball fields, a large multi-purpose field and a smaller multi-purpose field. Mr LaPosta acknowledged that most of the fields would come under heaviest use by the town, not the school, and incorporated this presumption into making parking areas and community access to the fields “as easy to use as possible.”

 The conceptual study performed by JCJ was based loosely on the March 15, 1999 Feasibility Study developed by Kaestle Boos Associates of New Britain. However, the Legislative Council halted a school board decision last spring, claiming it wanted to see Fairfield Hills resolved before committing to such a project.

In light of that delay, Superintendent of Schools John Reed on Tuesday night cautioned against making direct comparisons between JCJ’s study and that of Kaestle Boos, because when the Hartford firm was asked to perform its conceptual study last October it was given slightly different criteria to address.

Dr Reed asked the firm to think of a 5/6 school in terms of housing 1,100 students, instead of the original 1,000 students on which Kaestle Boos based its study. Secondly, JCJ was asked to take into account a ten percent increase in construction cost when arriving at potential construction costs. As a result, JCJ’s proposed school would cost $135 per square foot to build, compared to Kaestle Boos’  $120 per square foot estimate. Dr Reed has maintained the increase in construction cost is due to the Legislative Council’s delay of the issue.

Moreover, JCJ included in its study some things that Kaestle Boos did not, specifically a budget for a construction manager and a ten percent contingency cost to address possible construction problems. Mr LaPosta said JCJ would rather put the contingency fee up front and reduce it later, instead of having to drive up prices if a difficulty is encountered.

The 162,783-square-foot proposed school would come just under the maximum new school size allowed by the state to qualify for reimbursements. In total, the state would pay for 33 percent of JCJ’s 5/6 school, or $10,833,900. The town would be left to shoulder the balance of $21,996,100.

“Right now we’re just looking at the concept of it, and we understand that it could change,” said Elaine McClure, the school board’s acting chairman, of JCJ’s preliminary study and proposal.

Still, several listeners voiced concerns during Tuesday night’s public participation. Legislative Council member Joe Borst told Mr LaPosta that the proposal would be stronger if the firm addressed the potentially dangerous proximately of the bus drop and loading areas, and the possibility of working on the school structure and athletic fields simultaneously. JCJ had indicated building the school first, and then turning its attention to the playing fields.

Time is paramount for the school board in the 5/6 school issue. In a position paper delivered in October, school board members gave a time limit of December 1 for the fate of Fairfield Hills to be decided before it would progress with its own course of action.

With the only other 5/6 school option on the table being the reuse of Cochran House proposed by Becker and Becker, a plan that still has several question marks, the school board seems poised to commit to new construction. Mr LaPosta said a reasonable timeline for construction could have a new school in place by the fall of 2002.

The school board could vote as early as next Tuesday on whether or not commit to JCJ and new construction. However, Mrs McClure said this week she would not be surprised if the board had to meet with the architectural firm another time to address concerns and confirm information. A vote on the matter, as a result, could come out of a special board meeting in the weeks to come.

Tuesday night, Superintendent John Reed gave a clear request to the board to expedite its decision, saying that he hoped by next week’s business meeting the school board could reach a judgment whether or not to pass a resolution supporting new construction it could deliver to the Legislative Council. “The time has come where we have to move on this,” he said.