A Renewed School Is Born

What kind of committee has 46 members, but still needs more? Whose participants’ range from a vocal music teacher, nurse, custodian, local technology consultant, to parents? Has no statutory authority but still major influence? Shawn Hardy, a paraprofessional at the Vincent Mauro Magnet School for the past 11 years, is about to find out.

He’s just been nominated for an appointment on the large and still growing School-Based Building Advisory Committee — or a SBBAC in Board of Ed-speak — charged with helping to design and plan the new Vincent Mauro School.

The renovation cum addition is aimed to convert the current K- 6 interdistrict magnet school, with an emphasis on technology and math, into a K‑8 school by the fall of 2010.

Vincent Mauro, at the corner of Orchard and South Frontage, was built in 1987; it has grown crowded. In the next few years it will be rebuilt/renovated, one of some 50-plus city public-school construction projects since 1997 at a total cost of $1.5 billion.

Statutorily, when the state funds a school, it requires that a community-wide committee be formed to reflect the feelings and ideas of local people. In New Haven, that legal requirement is fulfilled by the Citywide School Construction Committee, chaired by the mayor. However, in New Haven, SBBACs have been created as a second layer or level of community involvement.

There are two reasons. First, the teachers, nurses, custodians, and parents who work in a building often know best what they need. Then also, according to School Construction Coordinator Sue Weisselberg, the SBBAC creates ​“buy-in,” that is investment of the community in their new school.

In short, the SBBAC helps with ideas to build not only a physical school, but also a spirit of investment and engagement evolves and the community gets connected to their school.

Birth Of The ​‘Cafetorium’

An SBBA sounds at first blush like an unwieldy bureaucratic monster. Weisselberg — who, with the school principal’s input, proposed the names at the recent Board of Ed’s Administration and Finance Committee on Monday night — said she loves to work with the whole school community through the SBBAC to brainstorm and fine tune designs for a new school. She said the approach has worked in each of the projects the BOE has constructed.

“The custodian on the committee will tell you how important to him is an elevator of a certain size and one that really always works,” she said by way of example. ​“So, OK, maybe we can accommodate by moving the plumbing a little over this way. We review that. Then a principal might say she absolutely needs to increase the size of the auditorium. Or, as is the case with Roberto Clemente’s committee, that they want a really large auditorium maintained, even though the plans call for that space to be shared with, say the cafeteria. So a partition can be created to divide up a new space, which New Haven appears to be pioneering in its schools, the ​‘cafetorium’.

“But then the custodians don’t want a partition that it takes 30 people to move, so we’ve found ones that work easily. And then within this space, what should the size of the stage be? Often depends on the music and performance teachers requirements. So it goes. Because this is an interdistrict school, we make sure that we have parents from other towns as well as local people. They have, say, parking/drop off concerns. We listen, and tailor, but within limits, of course.”

What it usually comes down to, Weisselberg said, is that the 40 or 50 people initially on a SBBAC become a smaller core who come to the meetings regularly to work through ideas. The others who have attended over the course of the plans developing, whatever their attendance, feel invested as well, she said.

The reason Weisselberg likes a large committee, she said, is that you can’t always tell who will contribute, although Mauro’s is a particularly group.

The group is excited. ​“At Mauro, for example, we’ve planned,” she said, ​“for a bigger library and media center and stuff related to science, which is their theme. But since they’re adding two grades, the older kids might want gymnasium space, and then we go back and forth.”

Do the architect and designers — in the case of Vincent Mauro, Roth & Moore; Zared Architects — attend these meetings?

“Absolutely,” said NHPS Chief Operating Officer Will Clark (pictured on the left with BOE member and temporary co-chair of the committee Michael Nast). ​“It’s written into the contract.”

“We choose architects,” Weisselberg said, ​“who are good at listening.” At the meetings there is voting by consensus on the whole range of issues – facilities to aesthetics. And the way the process works is that the SBBAC approves first before changes in plans come before the Citywide School Construction Committee for official approval.

“There’s, of course, a lot of tempering expectations after the initial SBBAC meetings,” she said. ​“People want to build their dream school, and then we show them they have, as in the case of Mauro, for example, 74,324 square feet to work with. Now how can we accomplish everything we want within that? Reality sets in. But also emotional investment.”

The almost universal response to a completed school is something to the effect that ​“I never thought it would look this great,” agreed the construction managers around the Administration and Finance meeting table.

Sean Hardy said he was not going to be able to attend a first meeting. Weisselberg was going to try to add some other people from Casa Otonal, nearby, as well as the technology partners in the business and college community. The other 45 members, plus new ones not yet named, would carry on without him for this one. The names of the Vincent Mauro Interdistrict Magnet School SBBAC will be forwarded to the full BOE for formal approval later this month