Community leaders take tour of new, under construction, Brunswick High School

BRUNSWICK — Brunswick Schools took a group of community leaders on a tour of the new Brunswick High School as it is undergoing construction on Thursday. Superintendent Jason Niedermeyer said the existing Brunswick High School is one story, a quarter mile long and was built over the course of four decades. The new building will be compartmentalized with communal areas like the gymnasiums and the performing arts center to the north while the two-story academic wings that are divided by grade level face the south. "How can we create classrooms that offer the most amount of flexibility for our teachers?" he said. "Right now, our teachers have to teach in spaces where there's zero flexibility. They have to adapt their teaching style to the room that they have, and we were purposeful in making sure that we created learning spaces where the room could adapt to the teaching style of the teacher." The academic wing is forked so the alcoves create more exterior walls to allow for natural light in the classrooms, Alex Grossman from Hammond Construction said. "When you work with the Ohio Facilities Construction Commission, every instructional space has to have access to natural light, so every single classroom where we will be doing instruction will have windows," Niedermeyer said. "If you go through our existing high school, we don't have that." There are 52 doors that connect to outside in the current Brunswick High School, Niedermeyer said. The three entry points at the new Brunswick High School are to the north, west and south. "The south entry, front facing (state Route 303) will be for parent drop-off and visitors to the building," he said. "The west entry is for kids coming off the bus. When you come here for a sporting event, you will more than likely use the north entry." A security feature that will be introduced in the new building is key fobs for the doors so staff members will only have access to certain rooms, Niedermeyer said. "Other than that, they're always going to be locked, so there's no master key that falls out of somebody's pocket and is picked up by somebody," he said. "We can, from a computer screen, manage all of those doors across the entire building." Niedermeyer said the district anticipates receiving the certificate of occupancy at the end of May and students will occupy the building a few months later at the start of the the 2027-28 school year. "We all have an 82-day window to get everything moved out of the high school, starting in the east, into the new building," he said. "We've been purposeful in trying to abate any area of the east where we know there's asbestos, so we've been working on that for two years." After the new high school is in use, the district will then tear down the existing Brunswick High School, Niedermeyer said. The goal is to have a new student parking lot where the east wing of the existing high school currently stands by Thanksgiving 2027. "We know for the first couple weeks of school, the kids might have to park at the stadium lot," he said. The new Brunswick High School is part of a $102 million project, which is using local and state funding, that aims to complete the district's facilities master plan. To learn more about construction within the district, visit tinyurl.com/2xandkn4. Contact reporter Madisyn Woodring at 330-721-4049 or mwoodring@medina-gazette.com.