Svigals + Partners
For the last six years Juwan Rollins and Khadesia Walker have gone to a school without a permanent home. Now they’re helping to build one of their own.
These seniors at New Haven’s peripatetic Engineering Science University Magnet School (ESUMS) — now housed in temporary space on Leeder Hill Road in Hamden — were among a hundred students, staffers, and officials who participated Tuesday afternoon in the long-anticipated groundbreaking for the school’s permanent building.
Allan Appel Photo
ESUMS Principal Medria Blue-Ellis with seniors Khadesia and Juwan.
The five-story cantilevered structure with state-of-the-art labs, computers, and 3‑D printers galore, on the campus of the University of New Haven, is the 38th project in the city’s $1.7 billion school construction program.
It’s slated to open in September 2016 at a cost of $85 million, 95 percent of which will be reimbursed by the state, according to state Commissioner of Education Stefan Pryor, who was among the bevy of speakers preceding the ceremonial shoveling.
Click here for a story on the odyssey of the school and its multiple locations; here for a story on the long road to finding suitable site in West Haven; and here for a story on how the sticker shock of the school’s cost was addressed, and local share reduced.
The 6 – 12th grade school currently has 570 students. That number is to grow to a 616 in the new location. The college-prep interdistrict magnet school enrolls 65 percent of its kids from New Haven, 20 percent from West Haven — where the adjacent University of New Haven will provide classes, teachers, and mentors — and 15 percent from surrounding Connecticut towns
UNH Prez Steven Kaplan, Pryor, Architect Svigals, and ESUMS senior Odia Kane.
Because they’re science and technology students, Juwan, Khadesia and some 40 other students have been visiting the building’s architects, Svigals + Partners, where they participate in the firm’s “Kids Build” program.
They helped design some of what architect Barry Sivgals called the “metaphoric strata,” layers of brick work near the building’s foundation that will feature images of inventors and scientists from our area, such as Eli Whitney and A.C. Gilbert, the latter of Erector Set fame.
When another group of students came to the office, they worked on cantilevering problems like those the architects had to solve for the new building.
“We’ll have them [the students] back to walk the site with our civil engineer and the landscape designer,” added the firm’s Julia McFadden, the lead architect for the project.
Seniors like Juwan, who hopes to study engineering at Cornell, Khadesia, who hopes to do the same at University of Miami, and Odia Kane, who just last week had her interview at Yale, will of course not be the first class actually to use the new building.
That honor goes to current tenth-graders such Nora Heaphy and Dana Joseph (pictured with their engineering lab teacher, Errol Lee). Dana said she is looking forward to the new labs to enable her to carry her senior of “capstone” project through from conception to design to testing.
Since she wants to be a doctor, her project will involve constructing a biomedical device, perhaps related to prosthetics, she said.
Nora said she’s looking forward simply to having a library so she can have a place to read both scientific journals and fiction.
“I [sometimes] bring my own tools to class to do a project,” said long-time ESUMS science teacher Roger Rushworth. He also said the current facilities on Leeder Hill Road are frequently not good for ventilation, so projects are done outside. That has not stopped the kids from scoring well on tests and winning laurels in city and state wide science compositions.
“This new building is going to allow us to do so much more. We’re psyched,” hesaid.
In addition to the spiffy new model-making wood shops with rotors and drill presses and the 3‑D printers, the structure itself will be a “building that teaches,” according to press materials. That is, the building will provide opportunities to see science and engineering concepts applied, including exposed structures, visible rainwater drainage paths, and an onsite wetlands study area.
According to the arrangement, all ESUMS students will be able to take advanced courses at UNH and receive credit, without fee.
Many of the speakers today, including the CSDE Commissioner, the mayor, the superintendent, the UNH President, also spoke of the importance of this school and the idea that STEM skills are the key to the future for our students, Kudos to the ESUMS staff, the parents and the communities for sticking with it over the last 8 years and working with the students to give the great education they've had without a permanent home. I'm proud of all of them!
-Richard Therrien
NHPS Science Supervisor