Harry Guo and Brandon Nguyen
STAFF WRITERS
Sunlight flutters through the floor-to-ceiling windows lining the hallways. The bell rings, and students file into the spacious avenues, chatting as they make their way to their next classes. A breeze of fresh air wafts in from the school garden filled with native flowers.
Wouldn’t that be wonderful?
Some proposed plans for the courtyard and exterior at AHS.
Architects from the Cambridge-based firm HMFH have pointed out that instead of light exposure and fresh air, we get cramped hallways and dim classrooms. They’ve discovered an increase in asthma and absenteeism at AHS, which could be solved by improving the school’s architecture.
The design for our current facility began during the same month John F. Kennedy was assassinated, November 1963. A lot has changed around education since that time, so the Andover School Committee formed the Andover High School Facility Study Committee in 2017 to examine options for a high school project. The committee, along with the architects from HMFH, highlighted 6 goals for AHS: enhance safety and security; eliminate overcrowding; accommodate enrollment growth; support educational programs and delivery; improve physical environment; improve site use and campus circulation.
Safety-wise, only 60 percent of the school has sprinklers to combat fires. The population capacity for AHS is 1,400 students. We are currently more than 20 percent over capacity, and this number is only increasing. Almost every student knows the 20-minute wait to get from West Parish Church to the front of the school in the morning when it should really be at most 2 minutes.
Carmina Merrill, a sophomore at AHS, said “the hallways get really cramped, and no one uses the lockers. If we removed the lockers, we would be able to make more space and decrease the number of traffic jams when going between classes.”
Principal Caitlin Brown has highlighted 3 plans for the future of the school. One plan would be an addition “that would include building in front of the [current] building… and renovating parts of the building along the way, at the end it would be a campus feeling,” which would take around 5 years.
The other two plans would be a completely new building. It will be built on top of the sledding hill, while keeping the field house, which would take roughly 3 years. Ultimately, Brown’s biggest concern is how long the construction will take. “A student could come here as a freshman and never see a new building. [The students] are the reason why I’m here, so [they’re] always one of my worries,” she said.
James Liebman, a Senior Associate at HMFH, was very excited about the idea of improving AHS. “It’s an opportunity for the educators, the experts, to step back and really gather their thoughts around what they want… and bring that out to the community,” said Liebman. “It’s transformative not from a building point of view, but from an education point of view.”
Liebman emphasized the importance of increasing collaboration, with the possibility of more breakout spaces among corridors for informal meetings. HMFH also came up with a new concept called “discourse labs,” which are elevated study rooms that can connect two to four other classrooms, and are made for more student interactions, not lectures.
Besides more collaboration, HMFH would like to improve the arts at AHS. A black box theater, which is a smaller theatrical space than the Collins Center, and a white box theater, which is more open and flexible for both theatrical and educational activities, are among the realm of new possibilities for AHS.
According to Shannon Scully, the Andover School Committee Chairperson and a mother of two AHS students, the high school is short in every area, most notably special education. “Compared to modern standards for the way special education works, Andover High only has about 50% of the classroom space that it needs to support special education sufficiently,” said Scully.
Another focus is sustainability, and according to Ms. Cutler, advisor of both the Garden and Environmental clubs, one of the biggest goals with buildings nowadays is to reduce energy use by electrifying everything. Liebman, with input from the Environmental Club, wants to create a “tight envelope… [meaning] that the exterior of the building isn’t leaky, [which] minimizes the temperature transfer… to create real energy savings.”
Students at AHS have big dreams for the future. Kaiden Serapiglia, a sophomore at AHS and a member of the girls swim team, said, “We definitely need a pool at AHS. It’s super inconvenient to have to use Greater Lawrence Tech’s pool.” Other students suggested ice rinks or a new turf for their sports teams.
However, Scully doesn’t want students to get too excited about amenities like pools and ice rinks. “At the end of the day, the focus so far has really been an understanding… [of] what we want it to be able to support for the next 50 years,” Scully concluded.
