East Somerville Community School plans begin

On May 20, 2010, in Uncategorized, by The News Staff

The East Somerville Community School will be back, promise city officials.

By Ashley Taylor

As
the end of the school year approaches, students look forward to summer
vacation, but for those involved in renovating the East Somerville
Community School, the work is just beginning.

Sixty parents
and community members met with architects and elected officials at the
Capuano Early Childhood Center on Glen Street Tuesday night to discuss
ideas for the renovation of the East Somerville Community School.

The school has been closed since it was ravaged by an over night electrical fire in December 2007.

It
was the last in a series of public meetings in which city officials and
architects solicited ideas from the community members who use it. City
officials will work with architects from the Maguire Group, of
Foxborough, to turn a list of ideas into a schematic design, a general
plan for the renovated school. By August 1, Boyle hopes to present the
schematic design to the Massachusetts School Building Authority, the
state organization that provides grants for school building and
renovation projects.

One new idea proposed at the meeting was
to designate some of the space for adult English language learners
classes, which meet in the evenings, Boyle said.

Boyle said
there were "mixed feelings" about rearranging a classroom for an
evening class. To avoid that, they discussed having some multi-purpose
spaces that could be used for school purposes in the daytime and for
English classes at night.

"The East Somerville Community
School, for years before the fire, was used many evenings by many
different groups. It was really a school and community center,"
Superintendent of Schools Anthony Pierantozzi said. At the meeting,
Pierantozzi said, they discussed "isolat[ing] areas of the building so
that parts of the building could be used in the evenings without the
entire building being open."

Residents also wanted a place for
buses to pull in and drop off students. Currently, Boyle said, buses
block traffic on Glen Street when they stop at the school because there
is no place for them to pull in. Boyle said that, "We're going to at
least give that some consideration to try and lighten the traffic
load." Pierantozzi commented that a bus drop-off area is "critical
because it's a health and safety item."

Ward 1 Alderman William Roche said the open space around the school should be preserved as the playground and tot lot.

"Right
now there's a lot of blacktop, a lot of parking area, there's what some
people may call underutilized space at the courtyard on the Pearl
Street side, so I figure we can green a lot of the blacktop, utilize
the open space near the entrance to the school on the Pearl Street
side, I think it would go a long way in preserving that open space and
making it useful for our children."

The ideas from this and
other community meetings will be used to create a schematic design for
the new school. Boyle said crafting a schematic design is the first of
four phases of a construction project. The schematic design is a
general blueprint for the school renovation, which he described as
"very conceptual in nature, very broad-based."

Planners will meet with the community again in July.