The City of Somerville hosted a community design workshop Monday evening at East Somerville Community School to discuss sustainability considerations for a proposed new school building at 115 Sycamore Street.
The building will replace the Winter Hill Community Innovation School, which closed in June 2023 after a piece of concrete fell from the ceiling following prolonged maintenance issues.
The new school is expected to cost roughly $300 million, with half of the funding coming from the Massachusetts School Building Authority and the remainder through local funds.
Richard Raiche, Somerville’s director of infrastructure and asset management, said the project is more than just a replacement for the Winter Hill School.
“Our goal here is to also accommodate all future district growth,” he said.
Raiche explained that enrollment projections developed with the MSBA aim to account for district-wide expansion. Many of the city’s existing school buildings — most constructed or renovated in the mid-1990s — are already operating at capacity.
The project also has an ambitious climate agenda. Raiche said that Somerville’s existing schools, such as West Somerville Neighborhood School, John F. Kennedy School and Albert F. Argenziano School, are around 20 to 30 years old, the age at which heating and cooling systems begin to fail. Instead of replacing old heating and cooling systems, the city is focusing on eliminating fossil fuel dependency with this new building.
This work requires vacating significant portions of buildings. The new Sycamore Street school provides the swing space to allow the city to renovate other schools in phases.
“Building this larger building at Sycamore Street, that’s built out for the long-term, district-wide growth gives us a lot of latitude in the shorter years to work around and vacate parts of these buildings to really do that work,” Raiche said.
The goal is for it to be Somerville’s first passive house, the designation for buildings designed to reduce heating and energy use.
To design the building, the city selected architecture firm Perkins Eastman through a procurement process required by the MSBA. Daniel Arons, a principal at the firm, said the design must balance various goals, including “sustainability, academic success [and] meeting costs and schedules.”
Raiche said the firm’s proposal stood out for its approach to sustainability and its strategy for dividing a large building into “learning neighborhoods,” or age-appropriate learning spaces.
“We’re going to be building a large building with a high student enrollment, but we’re also cognizant of the fact of educational outcomes, and want to avoid having the school building feel too big,” he said.
Arons said the structure will prioritize a well-designed learning environment and will incorporate “well-controlled, abundant daylight, fresh outdoor air, high quality filtered air [and] connections to the outside,” alongside non-toxic materials.
The goal is to create a learning environment that supports “all types of student learners,” rather than creating distractions that work against them.
Community members at the workshop also emphasized the importance of sustainability and student well-being. Kay Mammo, a member of the Somerville Carbon Free and Healthy Schools Coalition who has been advocating for the district to fully decarbonize, said the evidence for investing in healthy school buildings is well established.
“When you produce sustainable buildings, teacher retention, student retention, student health, attendance, all of those things go up,” she said.
Mammo was encouraged by workshop discussions around biophilic design, including the use of wood over steel, moss walls, non-toxic paints and floor-to-ceiling windows, features she said make a tangible difference for students and staff alike. Mammo specifically noted that using wood instead of steel is more sustainable and health-promoting, and that moss walls, along with thoughtful indoor and outdoor lighting, are elements the coalition has championed throughout the planning process.
For Mammo, the Winter Hill community has been without a permanent home for years, and that absence has had real consequences on the community.
“When students have a place that they can really call home as a school, that is not just a boring building, but a building that engages them every day when they come in, they’re more likely to do well,” she said. “I think to me and to the community that’s the number one priority.”
Monday’s event was just one of a series of workshops. Arons noted that the activities during the meeting, such as the dot-voting exercise in which attendees placed stickers next to design priorities on display boards, were just one data-gathering tool among many.
“We’re not designing for ourselves. … We’re gathering opinion[s], we’re gathering data points to inform preferences for design,” he said. “We’ve been doing this by talking to the schools, talking to neighbors, talking to city employees, sharing ideas among expert consultants, landscape architects and engineers.”
He also noted that keeping the project on schedule and maintaining “momentum” is critical, as delays can increase costs.
“Whether there needs to be a vote by the city to approve the funding, or we need MSBA to approve it, these things have to happen in sequence in order to keep us on track,” Arons said.
