SWAMPSCOTT — The School Building Committee (SBC) is considering how else the new Swampscott Elementary School may be used by members of the community.
In a virtual community meeting Tuesday night, popular suggestions for the new building included cooking classes, recreation for seniors and extracurricular sports teams for younger children.
“We’re talking about multigenerational use and that just makes us want to be more creative and more interesting,” said Leigh Sherwood, an architect on the project. “In our minds, it always has to work for the students, but we can make it work for everybody else in different ways.”
The current design for the new school building includes two media centers on the first and second floors, a gymnasium on the third floor, an on-site kitchen, art rooms, a maker space that opens onto a roof terrace, and a combined cafeteria and auditorium, dubbed the “cafetorium.”
Currently, all school lunches at Swampscott elementary schools are prepared at the middle school, as the lower schools do not have working kitchens on-site. Having a kitchen at the school itself opens up opportunities to use that kitchen to teach cooking to young children, although the idea would require discussion with Chartwells, the food service contractor that the town employs at its schools.
Danielle Strauss, recreation director for the town, said in the meeting that while the recreation department has offered cooking classes for middle school students and adults before, it had never done so for younger students.
“There’s a need for kids to be able to learn how to cook and sew, but there’s not time in the school day to teach them how to do that anymore,” Strauss said.
Strauss said that the indoor spaces offered by the school would also be incredibly useful for the town’s Park League summer camp program, which currently only has access to outdoor space and has to close on rainy days.
The new gymnasium, which Sherwood said will be approximately 9,000 square feet, will also offer recreational opportunities the town currently lacks.
“There really are no gyms,” said Assistant Superintendent Martha Raymond. “A lot of elementary students have to go to Nahant, Danvers Indoor Sports, or the YMCA, so it would be nice to have some community spaces where those sports could occur.”
Sherwood said that the SBC hopes to consult with more students who would potentially attend the school about what they would like to see available, and suggested that the town create a survey for elementary school students to complete.
Tréa Lavery can be reached at [email protected].
