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Date: 2/22/2021
EASTHAMPTON – Mountain View School, the new elementary and middle school being built at the former White Brook Middle School site at 200 Park St., is set to open next year.
The $109 million project was necessary for the safety of the cities students and staff.
School Committee and School Building Committee member Shannon Dunham said the city of Easthampton has one of the oldest school buildings in the state, Maple Street School, which is more than 100 years old. Center Pepin was built in 1975 and White Brook has had some air quality issues that would not be cost-efficient to repair.
Dunham told Reminder Publishing that the middle school wing will open in January 2022 and the elementary side will be completed in the fall of 2022. Dunham said there is a gap between the two grade levels for two reasons, the first being they did not want to move the elementary school students in the middle of the school year, and the second reason being, with construction still going on, with the old building still there, they did not want to bring in 700 students at once.
While the construction started in January 2020, the plans of a new school building date back to approximately 2012, said School Building Committee Chair Thomas Brown.
Brown shared that former Superintendent Nancy Follansbee was trying to get project approval from the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) but the plans were denied a few times.
Brown told Reminder Publishing that the original plan was denied because of the scope of the project.
“You obviously have to demonstrate a need for MSBA to be able to approve the project and the scope of the project. I believe in the beginning we submitted the request to consolidate all the schools and initially, MSBA wanted us to look at one school, do not look at all three, look at one elementary school. In other words, we might have been biting off more than we could chew at the time so they wanted us to look at just one school,” Brown said.
He went on to say the committee went back to the drawing board and began to look at Maple Street School and it became evident that it was more cost-effective to consolidate all the schools into one, rather than trying to renovate one at a time or build new school buildings one at a time.
Brown shared informational slides with Reminder Publishing that were used at public forums that were held for getting information out to the public.
Anticipated benefits include equity of opportunity to all Easthampton students to have access to 21st-century education, full handicap accessibility for all students, easily accessed recreational, performance, and dining spaces.
According to the presentation, every classroom will have an outdoor view, natural light coming into the classroom, ample storage, embedded technology such as teacher station and an interactive whiteboard, countertop display and workspace, flexible furnishing, and desks designed for classic or group arrangements.
Although the students will be in one building there will be separate entrances, cafeterias, nurse access, and gym entrances. Students will have also have multi-use auditoriums and media centers for the students.
In the beginning, the committee’s goal was to not touch the football field but as the progress went on it was determined that a new one was necessary.
Brown said the field received some updates five years ago but to end up with the best result, the best school, functionally and aesthetically, they needed to reconstruct and push the field back into the right corner.
Dunham shared that when the construction of Mountain View School is done, White Brook will be torn down and turned into a parking lot and there will also be a new maintenance building on the property.
“It is amazing, I cannot wait. It has been amazing to me to see the transformation, it is exciting,” she said.