Work hardly ever stops at new Barrington Middle School

The new Barrington Middle School is about 62 percent complete, says project manager

Posted 12/14/18

Construction was everywhere.

On the third floor, a man carefully grouted floor tiles inside a faculty bathroom. 

Inside the gymnasium, two men perched 20 feet above the floor in …

This item is available in full to subscribers.

Please log in to continue

Log in

Register to post events


If you'd like to post an event to our calendar, you can create a free account by clicking here.

Note that free accounts do not have access to our subscriber-only content.

Day pass subscribers

Are you a day pass subscriber who needs to log in? Click here to continue.


Work hardly ever stops at new Barrington Middle School

The new Barrington Middle School is about 62 percent complete, says project manager

Posted

Construction was everywhere.

On the third floor, a man carefully grouted floor tiles inside a faculty bathroom. 

Inside the gymnasium, two men perched 20 feet above the floor in mechanical lifts, sprayed a fresh coat of white paint onto the walls.

At the bottom of a trench that runs parallel to Middle Highway, two workers installed drain pipes that will help control groundwater and rain runoff.

On any given day, the new Barrington Middle School construction project plays host to between 120 and 150 workers — pipe-fitters, electricians, drywall hangers, window installers, masons, painters, and many more skilled laborers. 

The result, said Barrington Schools Superintendent Michael Messore, is an impressive display of progress. 

During a tour of the new school on Friday morning, Mr. Messore appeared quite impressed with the construction of walls inside the office space. 

"There were no walls on Monday," said Mr. Messore, who had toured the same space five days earlier. 

The project began in February, just days after Barrington school officials chose Brait Builders as the general contractor for the project. Since then, construction has been nearly non-stop. In fact, workers are normally on-site six days a week. 

The pace of the project was detailed during a tour in early August, when officials said the building was, at that point, 33 percent complete. 

Erik Andrutis, a project manager from Peregrine Group, LLC, said the new Barrington Middle School is currently about 62 percent complete. 

Officials have established a completion date of Aug. 2019 for the new building — they fully expect students and teachers to be in the new middle school at the start of the 2019-20 school year. 

The tour

Inside the front door to the new middle school, workers continued to hang sheets of drywall. Mr. Andrutis referred to the drywall as ARB — abuse resistant board — and said the new building does not feature any regular drywall. It's all ARB or mold resistant board. 

The walls frame in the spaces that will soon be offices for Dr. Andrew Anderson, the school's principal, and Erika Bulk, the assistant principal. There's also a reception area, a large conference room and a nurse's station. 

Just past the offices is the main intersection of hallways. One hall runs to the west past three floors of classrooms, the media center, the television studio, Maker-Space labs, breakout work spaces and other rooms.

The other hall runs north, past the industrial arts and robotics classrooms, the chorus and band spaces, the studio art rooms and a room that will be dedicated to professional development. At the far northern end of that hall is the cafeteria. 

The new building will not include a space for home economics. Mr. Messore said hardly any schools offer home economics as part of the curriculum these days; he added that student interest is far greater in the tech classes. 

"This was based on student need," he said. 

The gymnasium and auditorium are located in the center of the building, and the fitness room can be accessed through the gym. 

At the rear of the building, crews have already put down the first coat of an asphalt driveway. It enters the school campus off Lincoln Avenue and will be used for parents who drive their sons and daughters to class. There is also a large outdoor classroom space. Mr. Messore said each of the spaces was the result of the district's visioning process, which was intended to create a state-of-the-art learning facility. 

"There was a thought process to all this," Mr. Messore added.

The third floor classrooms are already nearly complete. Cabinets and counters have been installed inside the science labs, and the ceiling tiles are in place in some of the rooms. Lights hang from above.

Mr. Andrutis said the rooms will be lit with indirect lighting — the lights actually shine upward and reflect off the ceiling, casting an even light across the room. The classes are also equipped with photo cells that detect light levels and can automatically dim the lights when the natural light from the windows is bright. 

The entire building employs displacement diffusers to keep the spaces cool during the warmer months. The diffusers work similarly to air conditioning units, pulling the moisture out of the air and cooling it before cycling it into the building.

Mr. Andrutis said the building was designed to be energy efficient. 

Located one floor below the media center is the television studio, which consists of an on-air film space and a separate computer lab. The Maker-Space labs are nearby also. Last year's sixth-graders helped design the spaces with some outside-the-box ideas.

Dr. Anderson said the students wanted to equip the rooms with "bouncy floors and swings." The final designs stopped short of that, but will include some "flexible furniture" and useful tools, such as vinyl cutters and 3-D printers. 

Dr. Anderson is given a tour of the building each Monday, and posts the new construction on a weekly blog. 

"My reaction every single time is 'Wow, that's so cool,'" he said. "It's going to be an amazing space."

Mr. Andrutis said the new Barrington Middle School is completely unique, designed by the firm Kaestle Boos Associates specifically for the community's needs. He said many states use similar templates for constructing new schools, altering the size depending on the student population. That is not the case in Barrington.

"This school will be one-of-a-kind," he said.  

2024 by East Bay Media Group

Barrington · Bristol · East Providence · Little Compton · Portsmouth · Tiverton · Warren · Westport
Meet our staff
Jim McGaw

A lifelong Portsmouth resident, Jim graduated from Portsmouth High School in 1982 and earned a journalism degree from the University of Rhode Island in 1986. He's worked two different stints at East Bay Newspapers, for a total of 18 years with the company so far. When not running all over town bringing you the news from Portsmouth, Jim listens to lots and lots and lots of music, watches obscure silent films from the '20s and usually has three books going at once. He also loves to cook crazy New Orleans dishes for his wife of 25 years, Michelle, and their two sons, Jake and Max.