Lebanon, NH – When the doors to the new Lebanon Middle School open in spring of 2012, Trumbull- Nelson employees will proudly be able to say that they helped build their community school. Project manager Jim Odorisio notes that a large percentage of Trumbull-Nelson employees live in the area and have children who will attend the school. “The opportunity to build our community school was a big factor for us in undertaking this project,” he said.
Presently, the $24.9 million project is well underway and on schedule; steel erection started in mid February. The project broke ground in early October with a planned spring of 2012 completion.
The 105,000 square-foot, three-story school, designed for grades five through eight, will be located on an expansive site on Dartmouth College Highway with room for three athletic fields: a football field, a field hockey/lacrosse multipurpose field, and a softball field. Additional features include a full-service cafeteria and kitchen and a gymnasium. The school is designed to accommodate 600 students.
Although soil conditions create a challenge from a construction standpoint, Odorisio notes that it is “a beautiful site with sloping hillside and incredible views to the north.”
The school is a New England Collaborative for High Performance Schools or NECHPS project. Similar to the US Green Building Council’s LEED projects, CHPS schools create high-performance, energy efficient, well-lit and healthy environments for students.
As such, the Lebanon Middle School encompasses several unique features including a 3,000 square-foot “green roof” located on the south side of the building that will serve as an outdoor classroom complete with planting area, benches, seats and railings for science classes.
The school will also rely on a biomass heating plant consisting of a 300,000 BTU boiler and a 500,000 BTU boiler. The building will have solar hot water and a rainwater reclamation system that will channel rainwater from the roof to an underground storage tank where it will then be used as gray water for the building’s toilets and urinals. The spring 2012 opening will allow the biomass facility and air-handling units to be tested during the 2011/2012 heating season.
The building design makes use of natural lighting from several sources, says Odorisio, including an array of skylights over the cafeteria, gymnasium, media center and several corridors and classrooms. In warm weather, aluminum sunshades on the southern-elevation windows will work like Venetian blinds to block the heat of the sun from shining in the windows once it has reached a certain elevation. In this way, the building will receive the morning heat, but not the intense heat of later in the day. Interior light shelves mounted across the face of the windows at certain elevations will also reflect
sunlight onto the ceilings of the classroom and redistribute it. Light sensors in all the classrooms will dim the lighting when there is sunshine.
The exterior of the school will be a combination of brick, cast stone and metal-panel siding with high-performance Marvin windows. It will feature a membrane roofing system, typical of commercial buildings. Ingrid Nichols of Banwell Architects, architect on the project, says careful attention was made to create a school that was in keeping with
the community of Lebanon.
“We wanted this to be a Lebanon school,” she says. To ensure this, the building committee created a storyboard of photos of all the major public buildings in town to determine common elements. They decided to carry the brick masonry façade with white windows and popular cupola design over into this project.
“People care about this school and put in endless hours on all different levels, and the end product is really going to shine for it,” concludes Nichols.