The Board of Education on Tuesday voted 9-0 in favor of a recommendation to renovate the Saxe Middle School auditorium, expand performing arts classroom spaces and build a 2-story, 12-classroom addition on the northwest corner of the building for an estimated $16.9 million.
The proposal, which also includes one relocated science/STEM classroom in the addition, would meet pressing enrollment needs by providing enough classrooms “without sacrificing program or class sizes, and put students into appropriately sized classroom spaces,” said school board member Penny Rashin, who helped lead a committee of residents and town and district officials who are overseeing the project.
“While the cost is significant, we think this option provides an efficient solution to the needs of students at Saxe and urge you to support it,” Rashin said at the Board of Ed’s special meeting, a second read of the building proposal, held in the Choral Room at the middle school.
A conceptual drawing that shows about how far an addition at Saxe Middle School may have to bump out of the northwest corner of the structure in order to accommodate proposed new classroom space. Note: This is not a site plan, strictly speaking, but rather a rendering that is based purely on a feasibility study related to instructional space under one proposal now before the Saxe Building Committee and Board of Education. Credit: S/L/A/M Collaborative of Glastonbury
On Wednesday, Rashin said, the Saxe Building Committee will go before the Board of Finance to seek $750,000 in preconstruction funding for the project (architects, engineering, legal, owner’s rep, environmental testing, construction manager and cost estimating).
Parents and school board members in voicing support for what’s been called “Option 3A” pointed to rising enrollment at a school built for 1,200 students and attendant curriculum needs for the student body.
Superintendent of Schools Dr. Bryan Luizzi supplied updated enrollment projections, including these figures:
Projected Enrollment in Grade Combinations, NCPS
| Year | K-4 | K-5 | K-6 | K-8 | 5-8 | 6-8 | 7-8 | 7-12 | 9-12 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2014-15 | 1,625 | 1,929 | 2,299 | 2,917 | 1,292 | 988 | 618 | 1,869 | 1,251 |
| 2015-16 | 1,631 | 1,979 | 2,287 | 2,966 | 1,335 | 987 | 679 | 1,922 | 1,243 |
| 2016-17 | 1,676 | 1,996 | 2,349 | 3,025 | 1,349 | 1,029 | 676 | 1,945 | 1,269 |
| 2017-18 | 1,628 | 1,998 | 2,323 | 2,983 | 1,355 | 985 | 660 | 1,964 | 1,304 |
| 2018-19 | 1,650 | 1,968 | 2,343 | 3,019 | 1,369 | 1,051 | 676 | 1,976 | 1,300 |
| 2019-20 | 1,633 | 1,986 | 2,309 | 3,008 | 1,375 | 1,022 | 699 | 2,041 | 1,342 |
“Saxe was designed for a capacity of 1,200 students, and this graph here shows you that in [10] years we are not expected to be anywhere near 1,200 students,” Luizzi said.
Gene Torone and Kemp Morhardt— executive vice president of construction services and senior project manager, respectively for Glastonbury-based S/L/A/M Collaborative—said the project likely would take about 13 months to complete, meaning that if it started next summer, it would wrap up by the fall of 2017. The auditorium renovation would take place the first summer while a new classroom wing would be built, with that addition wrapping up and the music space bump-out taking place the following summer, Torone said.
A look at Option 3A, a conceptual plan that would see a two-story addition built onto the northwest corner of Saxe Middle School. Credit: S/L/A/M Collaborative of Glastonbury
Board of Ed Secretary Dionna Carlson thanked the Saxe Building Committee for its diligence (as others did), and called the proposal a “moderate” renovation given the educational needs.
“This is not building the Taj Mahal,” she said.
“There were sacrifices made in this [option] that—as a parent, my children are through Saxe—but I would love to have seen a much larger music and theater wing, because I think there is programming that is still not here in the middle school in that area. And there is science that shows how important music education is even to where we are pushing STEM and music is directly related to mathematical learning. So I want people to understand we are not putting a gold ribbon around this. This is a moderate renovation and I still go back to being at that Board of Finance where two members of BOF said, ‘Do not come back to us with something that doesn’t look to the future and build what we need going out.’ Because they know that bond rates are low and they know that this is the time to do this project. I think we all want to be strategic and say let’s do this for community in an effective way and really do this for our kids.”
School board member Alison Bedula said the needs at Saxe are “obvious.”
“They are apparent,” she said, addressing the Saxe Building Committee. “They have been proven. You guys have a done a tremendous amount of due diligence in terms of every aspect of looking at this thoroughly. We are looking at renovating a school that was already under-built by the time the previous renovation finished.”
Bedula added that the lack of space was not the fault of anyone on the Building Committee at the time, though the town is “paying a little bit for that now.”
“I cannot imagine that we would want to repeat that in the same building,” she said. “I think we just built a beautiful new building in Town Hall and there certainly was no discussion of under-building that.”
East School’s outgoing PTC Co-President Patty Zoccolillo said everyone familiar with Saxe knows that capacity constraints are “problematic.”
“I know the administrators do the best that they can and they are doing a great job,” she said. “But we all know that instruction and programs will suffer if we don’t add that classroom space.”
Janet Fonss, co-president at West School PTC, echoed what Zoccolillo said and added, “I think it’s important to understand that it is our future that we are talking about, and it is not just about performing arts. It is about the wave of the future.”
She noted that “people come to New Canaan not because of the state-of-the-art Town Hall. They come here for the state-of-the-art school system. So I really would like common sense to overcome everyone’s doubts about whether or not this should be done.”