This past December LPA|A was selected to conduct the feasibility study for the Town of Clinton’s Middle School, and the team wasted no time jumping right into the work, scheduling visioning sessions very quickly. The project team includes President Katie Crockett, who serves as Principal-in-Charge, Eric Moore who is the Senior Project Architect, Sean Brennan is the Project Architect and Peter Caruso is the Project Manager.

Christina Bazelmans is leading the educational programming process and working with consultant New Vista Design on a series of visioning sessions. Visioning is done through a series of meetings school administration, staff, teachers, and students to gather detailed and specific needs and desires for the middle school from a broad range of perspectives. This gives the design team a starting point for how to organize and design according to the highest priorities for the space.

Prior to these discussions, LPA|A facilitates tours of schools around the state to give people in the district ideas about what works well for other schools. The group visited three schools: Auburn Middle School, Sherwood Middle School in Shrewsbury and the Caleb Dustin Hunking School in Haverhill.

To date the project team has held three visioning sessions, which have included more than 100 people: one Virtual Community Workshop, two in-person workshops for students and staff and faculty. Real time surveys and interactive polls are sharing input back to participants during the meetings. Dedicated focus group meetings have been held to dive deep into the detailed requirements for topics like facilities and maintenance, IT, food services, guidance, special education, and art, music, and more.

To be as inclusive as possible, we offered live translated captions for the visioning, have facilitated a project website in three languages, and issued online staff and community surveys.

With all of this data now gathered, Christina, in coordination with Project Architect Sean Brennan, is embarking on the task of organizing this input into a programming document that will help guide the rest of the design process.

We look forward to sharing ongoing updates on the project as the work continues in the coming months.