Use this search box to find articles that have run in our newspapers over the last several years.
Date: 8/24/2022
WEST SPRINGFIELD — Construction on the new Coburn Elementary School building has been completed, and the school will be open for classes this academic year. The town issued a certificate of occupancy on Aug. 17, and administrators planned to move in during the last full week of August, preparing for the start of classes on Sept. 1.
“This will be the crown jewel of all of the schools in West Springfield,” said School Committee member Diana Coyne. “It is light filled, it’s spacious, and it will be a wonderful facility for our students, our staff,” she added, noting that she had the “privilege” of not only being a student when the former Coburn served as the town’s junior high, but, having known the building’s namesake, the late Philip Coburn, an educator and journalist in West Side.
“I do know how proud he would be to see he’s probably smiling down from on high,” said Coyne.
“I’m thrilled that we’re able to take our oldest school offline and build a state-of-the-art elementary school,” said Mayor William Reichelt, who chairs the School Committee.
Reichelt added that the demolition on the old school has already begun, and it should be completely leveled by the time classes begin. The footprint of the old school, facing Southworth Street, will become a parking lot, which should be completed “ideally before the end of the Big E,” said Reichelt.
The new building was constructed on the athletic fields and some former house lots behind the old Coburn School, facing Lathrop Street. The old building had been built as a junior high school in the 1920s.
The total cost for the construction and demolition project is $57,841,069, according to interim Superintendent Vito Perrone.
“The new Coburn is state of the art. Cliche, right? But it really is state of the art.
It’s going to support all our programs, all our teachers and all our students with respect to technology, with respect to instruction programming, social emotional health ... I mean, the playground and the gym and the cafeteria, everything, you name is just, it’s beautiful,” said Perrone.
The school will house classes from pre-kindergarten to grade 5. All classrooms from the current Coburn School will move to the new building, as well as kindergarten classrooms to serve neighborhood children, who will no longer attend the town’s kindergarten center at John Ashley School. Some programs from the nearby Cowing School building will also move to the new Coburn, part of a future plan to close Cowing.