for a belmont high school built in one thousand nine hundred seventy no longer serves the needs of our community the building does not meet code requirements or educational standards as regulated by ne ask the knowing glinda association of schools and college cited the school's aging infrastructure for not providing adequate space and facilities needed for instruction back in two thousand and four nay asked determined that the buildings mechanical electrical systems needed attention and conditions have not improved in the last fourteen years on top of that the building is simply too small and the continuous influx of new students has caused overcrowding at every belt and school districts in broome and has increased an average of one hundred five students each year for the last six years and this trend shows no sign of letting up in addition to the way we teach our students and the environment in which they learned the skills they need for college and career has radically changed  h s opened its doors twenty first century educational standards and expectations require real world problem solving skills and collaboration school spaces need to be flexible and a to adequately meet the needs of the community for the next half century we went from a thirty four hundred school district to almost a five thousand school district where roughly hitting that that top third maybe even top twenty percent of been roman in the state of massachusetts we have modules at the high school we are you using rooms and spaces that were not normally squashing spaces to support children in instructional periods of time so we have exceeded the footprint at every level of our course in our band practice in the old auto shop they have garage doors as a wall the acoustics the the quality of space and sound is really not appropriate for the high quality music program that we have we've had some shares removed to try to create some spacing to make it a more collaborative environment by doing a project based learning or collaboration if we have a student that comes in that has any type of disability maybe they're in a wheelchair there really isn't a space for them to come into the room it's not very welcoming to them they have to stand down on the bottom level it's not meeting the needs of our students right now on high school is not a da compliant the elevator is too small for a motorized wheelchair so students with limited mobility cannot access the second floor where the foreign language math and science departments are housed there are accommodated by relocating entire classrooms to wheelchair accessible spaces on the first floor this is not the inclusive environment we want for our children to be h s building has been well maintained but it's heavily used signs of severe wear and tear are certainly evident major building systems have reached the end of their design life expectancy and the infrastructure problems affect the day to day operation many windows leak every time it rains and there's evidence of water damage throughout leaking faucets from the science labs on the second floor damaged the classrooms below and aging plumbing has caused temporary closures of multiple bathrooms in one case forcing the evacuation of the entire overcrowding is evident throughout walk through the halls and you will see students filling every open space they work and socialize on benches outside of classrooms on stairways between floors and on the floors outside bathrooms and classrooms they're desperate to find places to work either alone or together the high school no longer has the space to support the current students and is not big enough for the larger classes rising throughout the school system i have quite a few of the triangle dust throughout the room unfortunately they're quite tight so once kids are kind of working on group arc i could have to send them over into the lab area i actually don't even have enough desks for students in here not having enough space really comes into play or doing chemistry labs because safety is like such a big issue for us so when you have kids over crowded in the lab area and they're letting bunsen burners they can get kind of scary and it's almost near impossible for students to be able to get to the safety equipment some of our safety equipment is nonfunctioning so for example we have to chemical few hoods that do not work as so getting around the room getting to students is a problem but specifically for science it's a safety thing the library holds four hundred to five hundred students at a time but it is often at capacity with a line waiting to enter if you can look around the space you see that there's not very many books it doesn't look like a traditional library and that's because space for students was made as a priority over resources there are often two or three chairs pulled up to each study carol so it is an individual work and because of space issues even in the bookshelves there are tasks and groups of kids will crowd in here as well i have kids come up smell the time and say misandry it's too loud to work in here but just slightly ironic because it is the school library the cafeteria was designed to feed four hundred sixty students at a time today it must accommodate seven hundred or more during some lunch periods many don't bother entering the cafeteria at all knowing that won't find a space to say the way that we educate our children has changed in the last fifty years but the building hasn't gone are the days of classrooms with desks and rows with a teacher lecturing at the front of the room entering classroom today you might find a circle of students in a discussion or clusters working in teams this type of collaborative learning requires space sadly lacking in many cases so the little theatre space that we're standing in now is currently used as a classroom space it's used as a performance space it's used as a study hall and lecture space and it's used as a community meeting and gathering space and it actually serves none of those for purposes while in the theater program we put two hundred kids a year do something on that stage and so the limitations of backstage space of what the current technology allows concerts and transitions for when the music department uses that space it also then doesn't serve that need as well as it could so what we are missing in performing arts is bases that do multiple things and do those multiple things well our programs are absolutely over reaching the current facility we have every possible space within the high school is being utilized student needs have changed and the building has been adapted as much as possible but it's simply not enough to have had students who were working dogs creating audio projects are for history class and they couldn't create the audio projects because the other students were so cramped and together in this would all space so then students tried to go in the hallway to do it they couldn't do it there because teachers from another classroom were also doing another group project in which students were working on something else so they were all together so they could record there and that's obviously not the kind of instruction that we want is fortunate after ten years of applying delmon high was finally chosen for a grant through the m s p a the massachusetts school building authority the state has recognized the critical condition at belmont high school and did a top funding priority under the m s b a the town will receive a large grant toward the construction of a new seven through twelve school that will support our goal of maintaining superior education in this building program would be essential to remedying those real big challenges of space appropriate educational space enrollment and not only do the spaces that we have right now not fit today's needs for students and teachers they definitely don't fit the needs of what i future students and future teachers want to do with clash of the state but the belmont high school building has become an impediment to learning every day students feel the impact of overcrowding of inflexible learning spaces and of an aging infrastructure both the massachusetts school accreditation agency and the m s p a have determined that the building can no longer provide an appropriate environment for today's educational standards the decision on whether to take the state grant and build a new school will be made by belmont's residents in november of twenty