Lebanon Middle School

Construction of the Lebanon Middle School is over 60% complete, and is on schedule for completion in April of 2012. The steel frame, concrete flooring and walls of the 105,000 square-foot building, designed for grades five through eight, are currently complete. Features within the finished building will include a full-service cafeteria, kitchen and gymnasium. The School is designed to accommodate 600 students. 

The School is a New England Collaboration for High Performance Schools (NECHPS) project. CHPS Schools provide 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 two boilers: a 300,000 BTU unit and a 500,000 BTU unit. 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.

Jim Odorisio, T-N Project Manager for the work, notes “the building design makes use of natural lighting from several sources, 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 typically found later in the day. Interior light shelves mounted across the face of the window at certain elevations will also reflect sunlight onto the ceilings of the classroom and redistribute it. Light sensors in all the classrooms will automatically dim the lighting when there is adequate sunshine.

The exterior of the School is 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 for 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. Using the storyboard as a guide, 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.