Melissa Bailey Photo
After years of waiting, Metro students moved into their own home, equipped with dizzying wall decor and some of the most cutting-edge technology in the school district.
Teacher Petrina Blakeslee (pictured, with seniors Vivian Perez and Alejandro Esquivel) toured her digital media class around their new environment Monday, on the first day of school in the new, $42.7 million building at 115 Water St. The business-themed interdistrict magnet school moved there after years in transitional buildings.
At a morning ribbon-cutting ceremony, schools Superintendent Reggie Mayo welcomed them to their new home. The school was the 35th to be built as part of Mayor John DeStefano’s $1.5 billion school reconstruction program. Mayo said the Metro students have moved through more swing spaces than any other school. Since its inception in 2003, the school has been housed at 21 Wooster Pl., 495 Blake St., and most recently at 130 Leeder Hill Dr. in Hamden.
“You can see it was well worth the wait,” he said, standing before the student body at the school’s four-story atrium. The school, designed by the SLAM Collaborative, was built to serve 400 students. It currently serves 167 students in grades 9 to 12.
Alejandro Esquivel said over the last four years, he’d gotten used to the transitional homes: the nap on the way to the Hamden swing space, the lost baseball in West Rock Park, which once served as a makeshift gym. For years, the students had no gym, no library, no art rooms, and no music rooms.
Now they have all that — and more.
The new school has wireless access everywhere in the building. Every classroom will have an LCD projector and an interactive white board. The school has five full computer labs, a small video editing room, two portable laptop carts, and a teacher’s resource room staffed with 12 more desktops. One lab has all 27-inch iMacs. That calculates to about one computer per student, according to Blakeslee, who teaches digital media and photography, and serves as the school’s information technology director. The ratio will drop to 2:1 students per computer once the student body expands to the school’s capacity of 400 students.
The new computers mean Lauri Gracy’s students can now use Microsoft Excel in their accounting class. In previous buildings, access to computers was tight, she said.
“I was teaching accounting with pencil and paper,” she said. In college, all accounting homework is done on Excel, she said: “Now the transition will be easier.”
At first-period class, Blakeslee’s students took a first look at the third-floor lab room where their digital media class will meet. It was stocked with all new Dell computers. Students will use Final Cut Pro, Adobe Photoshop and iMovie to edit photos and video, she said. She asked her students how they liked the new room.
Senior Shauniqua Davis (pictured) sad she welcomed all the natural light — a contrast to the school’s Blake Street swing space, which she described as “windowless.”
“It’s very exciting,” she said of her new school. “You don’t feel miserable.”
She’s been going to Metro for four years, and has eagerly awaited the move: “They kept saying next year, next year.”
“I feel more motivated, at home, more confident,” she said, seated near a window just half an hour after school began. “I feel like we’re finally settled — we’re not moving.”
A bit later on, a few students from Blakeslee’s class jumped online to check out their entry to a statewide film festival. Sure enough, their documentary about a new wind turbine at the Phoenix Press popped up on the homepage of CT Student Films.org.
“Uh-oh, we’ve got some competition from Career!” Blakeslee said playfully.
When one student protested that the other school’s documentary looked more high-tech, Blakeslee said not to worry.
“We’re getting there,” she said.
Moving forward, they’ll have a technological boost other schools don’t have.
“We’re the most technologically advanced high school in New Haven,” Blakeslee reckoned.
She said a lot of the technological improvements are ones that she could not make when she used to work at Wilbur Cross. Since she started working at Metro six years ago, she’s been heavily involved with the details of the new construction project. She sat on an advisory committee that shaped those plans over the past six years. She served, in part, as a lobbyist for including cutting edge technology into the design of the four-story, 78,768 square-foot school.
“I really begged the architects,” Blakeslee said. She said her goal is to get students ready, so when they go into a business environment, they’re ready to thrive.
Around 8:30 a.m., Blakeslee led her class on a tour of the building.
One student protested that the windows don’t work.
“There’s construction” outside, noted Blakeslee, referencing the highway work being done just outside the window. It’s better to have the windows closed, she said. The proximity to diesel fumes was one topic of concern as the school went through the site approval process. Many of the district’s new buildings have non-operable windows anyway, in order to help the heating and cooling system regulate properly.
The building’s exterior has a funky, multicolored paneling that makes it jump out visually to drivers passing on Route 34. (“It looks like it has the measles,” Downtown Alderwoman Bitsie Clark once remarked.) Inside, the wacky patterns are repeated in every room, from the tiled hallway …
… to the bathrooms (“don’t go in if you’re nauseous,” one observer warned) …
… to the two-story gymnasium.
A representative from the SLAM Collaborative said the school was built with a unique design to fit the magnet school’s business theme. For example, it has a room dedicated to the school store, where students will create a business plan and sell environmentally friendly products.
The school has a 105-seat lecture hall, equipped with a large screen so that classes can video-conference on a large scale. Students will be able to go up to a mic and ask a question to someone 1,000 miles away. “It’ll be like Oprah,” Blakeslee told her class. Her students already video-conference with other classes in Connecticut.
“Now, you can communicate gigantically,” she said.
Superintendent Mayo said he got dizzy looking at all the new technology in the school. He said the building presents great opportunities.
“Take advantage of them,” he urged. “You have no excuses not to excel.”