New Marshall Middle School hits halfway mark

LYNN – The city’s biggest school project in three decades is a year old and about halfway completed, with May marking several construction milestones.Window installation has begun in the new Marshall Middle School and will continue through June. The school’s brick exterior work will continue through the month. Workers will also install interior walls and staircases.For 15-year Brookline Street resident Antoine Paraiso, the work is transforming Marshall from a construction site to a structure that will dominate his East Lynn street.Paraiso looks forward to students enjoying a brand-new school, but said he will miss the days when the loudest noise on Brookline Street was a speeding car or passing commuter rail train.”It’s going to be busy,” he said.With construction scheduled to be completed next June, Marshall will be the first Lynn public school built from the ground up since a new Classical High School was constructed in 1997.It will provide space to educate 1,100 sixth- through eighth-graders on Brookline Street next to the commuter rail tracks.The building features brick masonry and a glass front designed around a central entranceway off Brookline Street. There will be two wings, one at the school’s Empire Street end and the other nearer Chatham Street. One of those wings will include the gym and a “cafetorium” that can be converted into an auditorium.Dianise Olivier has lived on Brookline Street for five years and looks forward to the day when her 9-year-old daughter, Courtney, attends the new Marshall followed by younger sister Rideline and baby brother Iziah.”It’s good for the neighborhood: It’s going to be nice,” she said.But Olivier wonders how Brookline Street – currently a two-way street between Empire and Chatham streets – will handle school traffic.”It’s going to be hard for us,” she said.A non-fatal shooting on Brookline Street last September left Paraiso worried and he knows trouble could follow teenagers to the new school.”What I’m worried about is drugs,” he said.Ward 3 City Councilor Darren Cyr said the new Marshall Middle School can be matched with improvements in the neighborhood bound by Essex Street, Chatham, Empire and Brookline streets. He has worked with residents throughout the construction process and said the neighborhood is a mix of small businesses and longtime residents like Paraiso.