Town Meeting ApprovesFunding For 5/6 School Architect
Town Meeting Approves
Funding For 5/6 School Architect
By Jeff White
Bringing a long wait to an end, the Newtown school district received a boost Wednesday night as residents turned out for a town meeting and approved appropriating $1.6 million to hire an architect for its proposed fifth and sixth grade school, in a vote of 163-2.
The vote came in under fifteen minutes, and the microphones at the end of the two aisles in the middle schoolâs auditorium remained quiet as no resident came forward to speak on the issue, except for an eager parent who urged the meeting to go to a vote right away.
The approved funding will go to hire Hartford architect firm Jeter, Cook and Jepson (JCJ), who supplied the Board of Education with a conceptual design for a school on the Watertown Hall site on Fairfield hills in early December. The $1.6 million will provide for architectural fees, project manager fees, soil testing and contingency fees, among other things.
âThis is just the first step,â school board Chairman Elaine McClure stressed to residents, noting that the remaining construction funds for the $32.1 million school would still need to be approved by the council and another town meeting in the coming months.
The proposed school would contain two academic houses, âHouse Aâ and âHouse B,â both comprised of two stories of classrooms and laboratories. JCJâs planned school would have a total of 44 full-size classrooms, grouped in sets of two-room âclusters,â each sharing a small project room.
Externally, JCJâs design calls for separating student traffic from the general traffic a school might generate from faculty and visitors. A separate bus and service driveway on the north side of the school 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.
School officials have maintained that the approval of architect funding for the school could be given without necessarily committing the town to the proposed site at Watertown Hall.
A final site for the school has not yet been determined. According to Superintendent of Schools John Reed the architects could perform their work without being site-specific for the first 30 to 60 days. After that, however, site design work would begin and an actual site would need to be determined. It is all part of the school boardâs âfast-trackingâ efforts to allow many facets of the projects to be worked on at overlapping times, with a potential opening as early as fall 2002. Construction would commence by October if all approvals were met.
The boardâs emphasis on flexibility comes at a time when town officials are working out two competing visions for a town-owned Fairfield Hills. Although the school board clearly favors the use of Watertown Hall for the 5/6 school, some Fairfield Hills decisionmakers are considering the option of demolishing Cochran House and suggesting the school be placed there, freeing up Watertown Hall to be âbuilding banked.â
Residents were noticeably encouraged by the swift approval Wednesday night. A large number of parents representing the interest group Support Our Schools rallied together in the middle schoolâs library before the meeting, and expressed surprise afterwards that the vote came with so little discussion.
Still some residents attending Wednesday nightâs meeting left feeling uneasy about the outcome. Rick Bovino voted against approving the architect funds, citing that it was too much of a risk to move on the 5/6 school when so many questions about its final location were left unanswered. âMy apprehensions have to do with the fiscal responsibility of the town,â he said. âIf you donât know where youâre going, any road can take you there.â