Rethinking Rundlett: Teachers say current building is ‘falling down around us’ in expressing support for Broken Ground site by NH Business Review for Jeremy Margolis-Concord Monitor

Rundlett Middle School’s three eighth-grade science teachers have grown accustomed to nature’s intrusions.

Last year, a bird laid six eggs in the exhaust pipe connected to Amy Schaeffner’s fume hood. When the nest grew too heavy, the pipe broke and a baby bird’s leg burst through her classroom’s ceiling.

“We ended up doing a rescue mission; I’m gonna just leave it at that,” Schaeffner said in an interview.

After a science lab that involved pumpkin seeds, plants began to sprout from the sinks in science teachers Michelle Ruopp’s and Sarah Grant’s classrooms.

Schaeffner, Ruopp, and Grant have also fended off more traditional pests, including termites, cockroaches, and bees. And when rain falls, it is water rather than living creatures that seeps through the roof’s openings.

“If we abandon this building, I think nature will take it back,” Shaeffner predicted.

Proponents of building Concord’s new middle school at the Broken Ground site have touted the outdoor educational opportunities the rural location will unlock. While those opportunities excite the eighth-grade science teaching trio, their more immediate desire is simpler: a building where interactions with the natural world occur on the teachers’ own terms, rather than at the whims of animals and weather.

Amid the frenzied debate over the location of the middle school project, the views of Rundlett’s teachers have at times gone overlooked. Five middle school teachers interviewed for this story framed their support for the Broken Ground location as primarily motivated by the urgency of the need for a new building, rather than by any intrinsic quality of the site.

“We’re working in a place that’s just falling down around us,” Ruopp said.

Reversing course on the new middle school’s location and rebuilding it next to the current school would likely delay the project’s completion by three years, until 2030, a representative from the school district’s construction management firm predicted this month.

That type of information contradicts what the school district has said about building at the South Street location previously – in 2017 HMFH architects told the school board that construction of a new school at the Rundlett site could take three years and four months and cost $75 million. The district’s current plan calls for constructing a 200,000 square foot school with new athletic fields on 24 acres of raw land on the city’s East side for $152 million. For comparison, the current Rundlett school is about 150,000 square feet and sits just under 20 acres of land, which includes playing fields.

Ruopp, who lives near Rundlett and has young children, had initially looked forward to the prospect of working within walking distance of her kids while they attend Abbott-Downing Elementary School, which is next to Rundlett.

“But my viewpoint has completely changed because I think if there’s going to be a delay, that is way worse,” Ruopp said. “We need the new school. That takes priority over any personal preference I have over just being close to my kids.”

If the district were to rebuild at Rundlett, teachers also expressed grave concerns about the prospect of contending with construction-related disruptions for multiple years on top of the daily building-related challenges they already face.

“Hearing these vehicles backing up, beeping all the time, and jackhammers and concrete, it would be insanely challenging,” Rundlett language arts teacher Linda O’Rourke said.

At the current Rundlett location, the footprint of the new school would likely come within 30 feet of the existing school, school board President Pamela Walsh has said. The project would also be built on the middle school’s playing fields, and new fields would presumably not become available until after the current building was demolished.

The structural, safety, and accessibility issues of Rundlett, which opened as a junior high school in 1957, are fairly well-documented and even those who disagree on the project’s planned location admit the district needs a new middle school.

But teachers and district administrators said the public may not appreciate the depths of the issues and the reality of what another seven years in the current building could look like.

Already this year, the district’s custodial team has replaced at least 300 ceiling tiles, principal Jay Richard said. Temperatures in the building’s classrooms can soar into the 90s. Limits on the school’s facilities mean certain educational opportunities pass students by.

Somayeh Kashi, an art and technology education teacher, said her students don’t have access to a computer lab for their tech ed classes. And her classroom has about four outlets, which means students are out of luck when their Chromebooks lose power.

The state of the building is “appalling,” Kashi said. “Kids are supposed to come in here and learn. And this is the capital of the state – it’s really embarrassing.”

Though it was far from her primary rationale for supporting the Broken Ground site, Kashi said she would love to take advantage of the landscape drawing opportunities that the 120 acres of city-owned forest in close proximity to the Broken Ground site would afford. She also said the natural setting could benefit students’ and staff’s mental health.

The eighth-grade science teachers likewise expressed excitement at the opportunities for outdoor lab work.

“We do try to take the kids outside now when we can, but there’s literally a dirt field behind our rooms over here, and if it rains it’s all muddy, and there’s not a lot of vegetation, and it’s all playing fields,” Schaeffner said. “So to get to any wooded areas from here is kind of a management nightmare, honestly.”

The equity argument in favor of the Broken Ground site – that having a school closer to where many of the city’s New Americans and students of color live would benefit them – did not come up in interviews. Eighteen percent and 15% of the students at the two elementary schools next to the planned site – Broken Ground and Mill Brook – are English language learners, respectively, compared to less than 10% at the other three elementary schools, according to data from the Department of Education.

The two schools collectively enroll about half of the K-5 students in the district so moving the middle school within walking distance of them would effectively create a second district campus with as many students as Concord High. (District administrators have said construction would not materially disrupt the elementary schools because the distance to the planned middle school is significantly further than the distance would be if the district instead rebuilt next to Rundlett.)

But neither the equity nor the outdoor opportunities arguments drove the teachers’ support for the Broken Ground site, which was wholly motivated by the urgency for a new building they feel daily.

“At this point, I just really feel like I don’t care what you think about the location,” Kashi said. “It just needs to happen at this point. We cannot continue to postpone this any further.”

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