Melinda Tuhus Photo
As the city moves forward with plans to raze the concrete bunker of the East Rock Magnet School, some neighbors wondered aloud if there isn’t a better use for the land.
The Nash Street school will be torn down this summer, a school official told 30 members of the East Rock Management Team Monday night. A new school should rise in its place by August 2012.
Richard Munday (pictured), a principal with Newman Architects, presented the plans to the management team for the first time Monday. Munday unveiled the new design last October to the East Rock School-Based Building Advisory Committee, which received it warmly.
Newman Architects
On Monday, he reiterated plans to integrate the new school into the surrounding neighborhood — a reversal from the existing school, built in 1973, which presents a facade of solid concrete on every side.
Munday showed a schematic drawing that will connect the school to its surroundings on both sides — Nash Street on the north side, a city park on the south side. He added that the new school will be significantly smaller — from the current 166,000 square feet to 78,000 — and will be much more efficient to operate.
Munday said the project is in the “schematic design phase — it’s been approved by the city” but he was soliciting neighbors’ feedback.
Claude E. Watt, Jr., manager for the school construction program, said a demolition date depends on approval from the state Department of Education (which is paying up to 90 percent of the cost of construction, since it’s a magnet school, as opposed to the 80/20 state/city split on neighborhood schools). He said demolition costs should be around $1 million.
None of the schools replaced over the past several years have been deconstructed rather than demolished, Watt later said. “We push for a percentage of material to be recycled, such as metal and wood,” he added.
Munday answered a number of questions about the landscaping and setback from the street, about how and where buses and parents’ cars would circulate.
Nobody expressed outright opposition to the design, though some wondered aloud whether it made sense to build a new school at all on that very valuable real estate — right off I‑91, at the entrance to East Rock — when only 20 percent of the kids come from the neighborhood. (Eighty percent come from the rest of the city.) A few people suggested that since it’s not a neighborhood school, and the kids mostly have to be bused in, the new school could be anywhere, and maybe the existing site could be used for something that would generate desperately needed tax revenue for the city.