vote on the debt exclusion regarding the replacement of the belmont the belmont high school we have with us today two people who have been deeply involved with the design of that project proposal we have who is the chair of the belmont high school building committee and jamie shea who is the a member of the belmont high building committee and a teacher at belmont high school and they're going to walk us through some of the  insides of that project thanks for coming over today thank you for inviting for having us bill i've already talked about the building committee can you give us a brief description of what it means to have a building committee and well belmont needs a building committee to follow through with the process so town meeting established the building committee the moderator point of the building committee and selected fifteen people that represent  of needs of for the school from the superintendent teacher we have architects engineers facility operator we have teachers and we also taught in a straight are on their people for more committee as well have a great committee of people knowledgeable in what it takes as a group to put a school together and when we talk about a new high school i'd like to do is to take a look at a slide that shows with the the new school is when we talk about a new high school or a new school because it's not really a high school this didn't start recently right th program requests to be to have the belmont high school part of their grant program so they call the statement of interest and it took ten years before belmont was chosen for this process and that happened in  let's talk about the need for four and new school you're there on a daily basis you were there a half hour or just just coming from there so i would say that they need fall under three categories there's this huge need with the current building the building has been very well maintained but it's fifty years old and so the current building has a many many problems we we know that there are huge problems in the science labs we have chemical fumes that don't work sinks they don't work appropriately and you know windows that leak many of the things on the nd floor where the art department of science departments are we going to into the st floor so you can see evidence of water damage around the ceiling on the st floor the plumbing leaks quite often or clogs so we've had some plumbing issues as well at the high school so even the current building as it is the facilities themselves are not are not adequate the nd problem though busy with the facilities relates to the  renovating the current space won't solve some of the facilities need that we have at belmont high school there's just not enough room i teach three classes at the high school and i teach them in three different three different classrooms there are spaces that are being used as classrooms that were not intended to be classroom spaces the most raking of which is our course room we have one award winning music program in belmont our chorus practice is in the old auto shop so there is garage doors for walls the acoustics are terrible it's freezing in the winter and boiling hot in the summer in addition to we're getting about one hundred new students in belmont every year and you know superintendent fallon has done a great job with support from the town i trying to hire more staff to lower class sizes class sizes we're getting in that in the ten or in the high school up in around thirty he's we currently have doesn't fit a motorized wheelchair students that are in motorized wheelchairs cannot access the nd floor and they're currently accommodate added by moving classes down to the st floor the problem is the math the science and the foreign languages are all house on   nd floor so it would be really hard for that soon to go to meet a teacher during a free period and then there was issues as well there where you said three needs the rd need is just that the the existing school really doesn't serve us well in st century learning or at st century the right you don't really see a lot of classrooms anymore where you've got kids in rows and a teacher at the front of the room most of the time when you walk in the classroom you see kids working on projects and groups and teachers walking around in facilitating that that becomes very hard to do when you have classes where there's twenty seven kids twenty eight kids i was just doing a group project today i had to send to my groups out into the hallway because they couldn't hear what was going on because you're twenty seven kids talking excitedly it gets very loud very quickly and so there aren't any spaces for kids to work in breakout spaces when they're working in a group work the class sizes are very very small and they're not flexible spaces so i can't make a larger class one day physically if i were depending on what i was doing if i was doing something where kids mean to break us faces and room to move around and manipulate different artifacts what have you the new school then which is the solution that the town in the school district and found to be the appropriate solution combines a number of different grades we're not talking simply about a new high school we're talking about a school for grades seven through twelve right that's correct can you i like to talk about it as two schools really forget we're we're building two schools here we're building a middle school high school together we have that approval from the state as one school so it's a seven through twelve school was decided late early this year that this was the curriculum exchanges and so forth that's now sometimes happening by kids walking to the high school but now the will be there they can share the phenomenal resources of things like art and music they  spaces robotics physics coding that some of those students at the upper middle school age want to do but it's hard to offer secondly it's really is a challenge each honoree today with four grades superintendent failing has explained this quite a bit that it is our biggest challenge in the district taking two grades out and shifting that it creates a better upper elementary school and it it certainly relieves then the entire district of the challenges that jamie said which is complete overcrowding in all six schools complete so it is a complete solution in one project it is a big building but it's housing six of the thirteen grades so nearly half of the school district that is is moved into a brand new f now i had dan richards on my i pod cast as you may know i do a podcast in addition to these telecasts and he and i talked about st century learning he talked about the fo trade and so that is what i'm so excited about with this new space we don't necessarily have hallways in the new building the hallways are multi purpose they are they can be used by students to do some breakout  work there are some glass so that teachers can see that they're in the classroom they can see out into the hallway to help monitor students that are maybe out there working there's also space for students to continue working on projects that that when they're not in class during a free period and the problem is that in the current building we have old fashioned hallways and we're using those hallways that are really home always with no for you know on family damaged it did put benches in some of the hallways because the kids were just sitting on the floor but those hallways are used for students to socialize during fre periods they're used by teachers to as breakout spaces they are used by students who are trying to get to study and get work done in between classes and they're not made for any of those things and so the new building has space outside of classrooms or students can study quietly on their own where they can work collaboratively collaboratively with groups or they can socialize and have some downtime with their friends and that's really really exciting in addition the current building has inflexible space so if i want to create an interdisciplinary class where i'm combining social so the skills with math skills for example we don't have any space in the current high school that could accommodate your teachers and sixty students all learning in an interdisciplinary manner  and the new building will have officers where there will be removable walls in some cases so that you could create a double classroom space if you wanted to do if you wanted a project for example or if you wanted to work with someone from another department i'm a mult failed project which is really what we really need to be doing about my high school educated studies is in my opinion one of the best ways to help kids be prepared for the world that they're going to be entering well we're talking about this even just between the three of us i hear us talking about the school or the high school but again there really are two schools here and there is the lower school in the upper school and that i'd like to let's start with that i may be asking a question that i that doesn't have an answer but when i looked at this it looked to me like the lower school there which is up in the upper right hand corner of the screen is really a decision was made by the school but most school committee to go to some through twelve the desire was to actually create two schools one for each to have a separate identity particularly at the middle school as they come over and so the middle school entrance is separate from the high school entrance two sides  they may have separate times they start so that works out well they also how was a building that's three stories high consists with today's generous school so it's not imposing as they walk up the st day to school it's welcoming and as you move inside they're not integrating with the nine through twelve they're on their own side of the school so the high school side and entrance has the students on the other side they move right up to their classrooms and they have team set ups that they're used to today and they're great team so if you keep talking about that to me is that's the best part of the school so they're clustered in groups of four they have their own identity space inside these are the teams themselves so we're breaking the school roger down into smaller families into smaller groups so you have that individual feeling and i think with are not near each other necessarily within a team so now they're going to have a space where they have all their core subject classrooms are all located around what we're calling it evasion space which is really a breakout space in the middle work where you could have team meetings where kids could break out and have where they have their lockers where they could have group work during the class plus the in interiorly the walls within the chip between the two classrooms will move so if they want to create one big space for a team meeting or a team day they have that ability to and that's really really exciting in addition the current transition from it's a nice create is really hard for kids and so i'm not only a teacher and on a daily committee but i'm also a parent this town and i have a rd grader a th grader and a brandon high schooler so i also seeing the district as a parent all through three levels and i can say that that transition difficult because kids are moving from a team model to a departmental model so all of a sudden now they don't have a core group of teachers that are responsible for them and it's a brand new building and it's a big building and so that is a double that my counselor loves to call this the double whammy it's two major to and this and mike mcallister who is principal of the chant yes for those who don't know yes and so what i'm really excited about the seven through twelve for a lot of different reasons but one of them is because it is going to ease that transition kids will come from the th grade and transition into percent of grade in the same type of teen model in that cosy atmosphere in the th and th grade and then when it's time to go over to the high school side they're not in a brand new building they already know the building yes the nd thing i will say that you know john fallon let's talk about careful connections and thoughtful separations and the time john i mean the superintendent and yes and they are separated out from the high school side in many different ways but i would also like to say that there are some potentials for some really rich mantei age learning that can happen it's wonderful when you have an older child working with a younger child and that old child gets to become a teacher kids love kids i mean kids love learning from talking to other kids so i also would say that it's exciting because you might be able to foster some of this month a multi age learning opportunities within the building ha besides besides the separate entry they'll have separate nursing separate walkers cafeterias there they have a separate cafeteria where the eating they share the same server obviously probably different times separate whatever rather separate maker space or it to say ok i would like to ask one more question about the the physical facilities because i have seen renderings of the the building and one thing i was struck by i don't mean to talk to you all the time but one thing i was struck by was just the number of windows in the building in my in my scene something that isn't real there is there an intentional decision to put in that's a good point because we hear a lot about that oh my goodness the windows it's not so the amount of glazing on the building is not disproportional to what you see in the schools at all it's thoughtfully placed to allow natural light throughout the building deep into the building and jamie will tell you that it is a it is a  welcome commodity so i often say and i've learned this talk to superintend of philip the building is not just a building teachers have many tools they have textbooks they have their own intellect the building this classroom is part of their tool and the they need to have the best tools they can to to give our students a great chance so this will have natural lighting all the way through very good ventilation all the way through flexible spaces jamie talked about the walls can move around we're building a building for fifty years you and i don't know what's going to happen with education in fifty years but what we can tell is i look at the existing drawings from fifty years ago this high schools fifty years old now next year and you look at the drawings of what was there with a plan for and you look at what's going on now completely different yeah but it wasn't made to be flexible but for terry talks about so it's very difficult this building it has that flexibility built in so fifty years from now when they see my name  jamie's probably on something there said they thought about something that's flexible and that's gave us something so i hope that's truly case i'm joking but it's really important to build flexibility probably the highest thing in that i would say that we've heard over and over again is make sure that there's flexibility and it actually you know bell will tell you that we've we've had seven community visioning fashion where we had parents teachers community members and students all talking about it and write all talking about you know what we wanted for the vision of office going how are we going to build this building to help us meet our vision and one of the things that every visioning session everybody play that is one of the top priorities was flight responsibility spaces and we're even talking about flexible furniture so that you know the school the furniture is movable exchangeable so that classrooms can be used for most i know i'm all for two different kinds of and how about the walls of the classroom there is an affront to the classroom all the time being you know you have multiple configurations you can set the classroom up with the  rules has committed to belmont of eighty million dollars for this project through a long process years of working with them these past two years but that's a big chunk of the total project so the net is two hundred and fifteen million dollars that belmont will have to fund out of that the two million dollars has already been funded for the work that we've done so far it's so the net is two hundred and thirteen dollars still a lot of money this is a very large building as i said half the school district nearly half will be in here it's not reaching five it will be reaching five thousand dollars might have half the school district or goes to him and that's a very good point interrupt that no i mean jamie talks about this you know twenty six thousand residents nearly five thousand of them are in our sky thirteen grades of education that's a tremendous percentage of our population it is a large cost with a large building but no different than what other communities are saying it's not bells and whistles it's not extravagant we can't be extravagant because the state our partner wants to make sure state tax dollars are being wasted so they screw and that's the eighty million dollars they're not going to commit to giving us money if it's bells and whistles so this is your basic school we talk about things like light and ventilation that's natural that is what happens in schools these days you know arlington and waltham are seeing the exact same impacts to their voters as they plan their new high school and and it's happened this is not the biggest school in the state by far  and it is clearly not the biggest school anywhere in the country there are some tremendous schools but it's big for us our community it's definitely large and the cost is significant because of where we are in construction so i have a money and what i what i'm challenged with is what can we do to change that and there's not much we could do roger to change that because to properly give our students the space that they need and mind you we went through several phases with the m s p of reducing square footage we've pulled it all down but there are six grades in here that needs a space that  totals about four hundred and forty five thousand square feet our current school is two hundred dollars less than two hundred and sixty thousand square feet so it's a sizable increase to the school facility and with that comes a sizable cost of construction costs are escalating four to six percent a year that is in the cost we have contingencies in that cost we have all the soft costs for design our design professionals our relocation costs where we have to move in modules but we physically have to move them into the new building there's a cost associated with that and there's phasing our project is going to be built in phases and i know we might talk about that yeah but there's a premium for that we're building it on a dump so ringback the former there's a premium for foundations so this gets all layered in to what is the total cost of the project and i have heard i don't know if it's true so i'm going to ask you that i've heard that well we obviously don't have an alternative location so it's got to go where it where it's going and where it's going is an expensive place to build and that's the reality is that it's complicated with like i said the the foundations that have to go and it's complicated because we don't have a place for high schoolers to go on like wellington a much smaller school we built a temporary program one of them that's a very high cost not reimbursable by the state we beyond that to build a temporary facility and i'm going to throw that capital investment away because it's  temporary the design here is fantastic because we're not going to move our high school jamie's going to continue to teach for two more years in the high school was with a successful vote in november we start construction next year and two years later two thousand and twenty one the high school is done in the students move in to the new high school and then the old high school portions of that could be removed to make way for the middle school the lower school to be built to and let's throw up the slide out with phase one with the high school construction because exists today with the work with the teaching and learning that will continue unimpeded we've carefully created a line of new construction that doesn't affect the teaching and learning that goes on today it will have  height wall throughout the height of the building where workers will be on one side and students will be safely on the other side no one will cross that from one side to the other it's a safety line it's a construction line it's the line that divides the existing teaching and learning from the new construction ok this is not a new one hundred and two construction many schools go through this and this is that the method that's employed we brought on our construction manager early we already have my board and they have been helping us ensure the schedule the feasibility and the phasing so that we know exactly what we're doing and then the kids move into the high school in the middle school and the old school gets torn down in the middle school is constructed on the easy thing to say the kids on actually move they they leave school and in june of two thousand and nineteen and they come to school i'm sure you've got some twenty one and they come to school in two thousand and twenty one september in a brand new school interchangeable middle school or school but that's what me in the middle school be constructed for two years they're not even affected right they're still up and generally happy as can be just cramped but happy and the best that's great well we're out of time guys thanks  thanks for stopping over a big decision on not on november th and we are not going to encourage you to vote one way or the one way or the other we are going to encourage you to vote however on november th it will be at your regular polling locations it is one of the more significant one more than more one of the most significant elections in votes that voters will face here in belmont in the near future or in the recent past we have been talking today with bill of allah who is chair of the belmont high school building committee and jamie shea who is both a belmont high school teacher and a member of the building committee they have been working for the last several years to get this project this is community conversations i'm your host roger colton i will talk to you again next time