As part of the town's efforts to improve the educational benefits, safety, and accessibility of the high school, the FHS Building Committee has partnered with two architectural firms that will present multiple conceptual options for evaluation against the needs of the current building.
The conceptual plans look to address five fundamental challenges that will improve the practicality, safety, and academic capability of the building. The needs of the building consistently impact the FHS community. The following insights will allow members of the Farmington community to experience how the current building affects students and faculty.
The external requirements for the building include improvements to the school's accreditation and accessibility. The New England Association of Schools and Colleges has placed FHS under a "warning status" due to severe deficiencies in ADA access, heating, ventilation, and inadequate educational facilities. The school's inefficient layout significantly impacts students with disabilities and injuries ability to navigate the building. Examples of these limitations are seen in the music spaces, media center, gymnasium, certain classrooms, bathrooms, and auditorium.
"The bathroom stalls are typically narrow, and the doors can be found cumbersome to open normally, let alone with crutches. It was also a challenge for me to access the auditorium, as the spaces between rows are minimal and limited my ability to find a sufficient seat,” junior Senan Gorman, who has previously used crutches in the high school, said.
The current building is subject to many challenges that can limit the educational and energy efficiency of the building, in addition to compromising the safety of the students and faculty. After undergoing seven additions and renovations, heightened security was not a consideration. The additions leave FHS with 23 separate exit points and a lack of separation from the public. The sprawling layout also hinders the building orientation, which can limit the effectiveness in which students and faculty can navigate the building.
The main impacts of the sprawling layout are displayed during passing time. Students experience lengthy passing times between classes, and it can be difficult to arrive to class on time. The excessive number of students in the hallways during passing times creates difficulties in arriving to class on time as 30% of the total building space consists of hallways.
“As a freshman, I have already experienced extreme amounts of hallway traffic. With four minutes in between classes, students should have enough time to get from class to class and have an extra minute to get settled. However, with the narrow walls and intersecting hallways, students face difficulties,” freshman Sydney Bigelow said.
In addition, FHS is starting to become limited in its ability to prepare students with complete 21st-century programming and learning spaces. Classrooms and essential learning spaces (library, music spaces, auditorium) lack enough space for students and deprives students' abilities to exercise all benefits of the building. Additionally, performance centers and music rooms lack the size needed to accommodate the number of students and they struggle to create a collaborative environment due to an impractical layout. The absence of these two factors reflects on how the students are being prepared for their classes and a possible career in the future.
"The band room is poorly designed and limits the acoustic capability. Additionally, getting to your seat and setting up your instrument is difficult due to lack of personal space," Alen Joseph said.
The FHS Building Committee will look to use student and faculty feedback to shape the multiple comprehensive plans. These conceptual proposals will look to create a more efficient layout, which will increase building safety and allow students and faculty to navigate the building more effectively. Additionally, the committee will also look to develop a more accessible building that will coincide with ADA policies. The proposed changes will create a better academic and practical environment that will increase the potential for both students and faculty alike.
Submitted By: John Guerrera, FHS Student
Entering my seventh year of teaching in Farmington, I walk into school with the same feeling that I have had since day one: amazement.
I never imagined working in a district where the students are so kind and selfless, where they fearlessly question and challenge each other and themselves, where there are classrooms where robots are built, blueprints are made, and novels are written. My colleagues give me the same feeling of admiration with their dedication to their learning and the risks they take to do what’s right for students.
At the high school, I take on many roles aside from being an English teacher: I teach our Journalism elective, advise our newspaper, and collaborate with a colleague to run the weekly broadcast; I am the Cheer Committee Chair; I am one half of the co-disciplinary team for American Studies; and, ultimately, I am an in-school caretaker for my students. Outside of school, I am a student who wants to improve her teaching practice so that she can give her students what they deserve and serve best in all of these roles. And yet at one point or another, the physical infrastructure of the building has hindered me from applying my learning.
Only a couple of years ago, my students and I literally dodged leaks from the roof that permeated into our classrooms and the hallways. I learned to get into my classroom early to check for desks that had been covered in brown liquid overnight. While we may have patched up areas of the roof, this speaks to the outdatedness of the building, and I worry about what problems might manifest overtime. Teachers and students spent weeks outside of their office spaces and classrooms while the issue was mitigated, and with the age of the current building, it’s hard to predict where and when more problems will resurface.
I am at times reluctant to walk into my classroom in September and when the heat returns in June because many of our classrooms are un-airconditioned and don’t have windows barely open; with six fans in my current room, I am confident in saying that they do little to cool the students down as they try to focus. On the other hand, the open campus style of the building can make leaving the warmth of the office space difficult during the winter, when the Student Entrance corridor that connects to the 600s hallway nearly matches the frigidness of the cold outside due to the multiple doorways opening. And while we persevere through varied temperatures, it doesn’t make the classroom environment necessarily conducive to learning.
The first two years that I taught Journalism, I shared a space with the Art Department. But as they expanded and built their own program, there was no longer room for my students and I to layout our newspaper in the Mac labs. Currently, we live in a room with a cart of laptops that not only lose battery life quickly, but also have to be taken down to our tech team on a regular basis. And although I have had a number of people offer alternatives-- virtual desktops in the library, sending students to various locations in the school-- this certainly doesn’t contribute to a productive work flow, nor does it help with building the type of team needed to push out the paper. We make it work, but I wonder constantly how far we could go if the small things were just a little easier. The lack of adequate space for current or new programs limits student opportunities.
Last year was the first year we piloted American Studies. With fairly large classes, my co-teacher and I were extremely thoughtful with how to serve our students best. We often spilled into connecting rooms and hallways. Cramped in a tiered lecture hall, students had to be creative to work in groups. This year, we knocked down a wall in order to fix some of the problems with the day-to-day operation of class. The larger room allows for flexible learning, which in turn has helped us create learning opportunities for students that better meet their individualized needs and offer them more choices in their learning. Simply enhancing the size and layout of the space has made our classes not only seem smaller, but has allowed for even more equitable teaching practices that paves ways for the best chances for student success.
But these opportunities around the building are limited; with two rooms with this structure, many other teachers and students will never get to experience a physical space that allows for this type of teaching and learning. I have the utmost respect for my colleagues and know that they make it work no matter what, but what more could we all be doing if the right structures were in place?
One highlight of my day-to-day is serving as Cheer Committee Chair; my role is to support and bring happiness to my colleagues. And while I truly enjoy creating opportunities with the committee to bring the faculty and staff together through activities, it can be difficult in the massive, sprawling layout of the building.
The other day, a classmate of mine from my doctorate program came to visit. As we toured the building and made our way around, I realized how little I see my colleagues in the Art, Counseling, World Language, Music, and Wellness Departments. For a district that prides itself on collaboration, the physical space does not assist us in this mission. And as I make the infrequent trips to the other side of the building, I can’t help but think about our students and the four minutes of passing time they are allotted to sometimes scramble from an Art class in the 300s to an English class in the 900s wing, especially when we have intersections of the building that clog and create an impasse due to the tightness of the hallways.
Strategic planning and the design of spaces that allow for collaboration between departments can offer abundant opportunities for ease of creating cross-disciplinary curricula. As someone who has had the good fortune of working with a social studies colleague for two years in an interdisciplinary setting, I have challenged my students with the chance to learn through creative assessments, authentic applications, field trips, and self-reflective practices. And as much as we talk about cross-curricular opportunities with other departments, simply walking across the building to meet and find space pose challenges. And when we do find these spaces, they are often filled with students who also are similarly looking for places outside of a full library for room to collaborate with one another. Most of our professional development opportunities and meetings take place within a very tight band room or in our cafeteria, which is not only uncomfortable but limits the work we can do with the sparse time together.
As a district that holds their students to high expectations and often leverages the resources, both in material items and personnel, to meet the needs of all of our students and provide them with rich learning opportunities, thinking about a new building offers students and teachers the latitude to continue doing even more innovative work together.
Submitted By: MJ Martinez, FHS Teacher