The Everett School Building Committee spent its April 8 meeting doing two things at once: moving the paperwork along and selling a very large idea about what the next school building is supposed to be.
The paperwork part was quick.
The committee was called to order, took roll, and stood for the Pledge. Mayor Robert Van Campen answered “Here.” Kimberly Auger answered “Yes.” Samantha Hurley, Palumbo, Freeman, Febbo, Brady and the rest were recorded present, though the transcript garbles a few surnames along the way. That happens. The vote counts matter more than the stenography.
First up was approval of the March 11 meeting minutes.
Samantha Hurley made the motion “to approve the meeting minutes as amended due to some clerical errors.” Van Campen seconded. The roll-call vote came back unanimously yes from the members clearly captured in the record. The chair then announced, “Motion has passed to approve the meeting minutes.”
Then came the monthly invoice package for March 2026.
Van Campen moved to approve it. Auger seconded. The summary provided from the transcript cuts off before the full vote language, but the package was presented as a standard monthly approval item with an updated budget item included. In other words, the bills keep coming, and the committee keeps moving them through.
The more interesting part of the meeting was the design presentation.
Perkins Eastman laid out a concept for a new school organized around what they described as a central spine, basically the main internal street of the building. The pitch was that students would be “walking through the heart of the school,” with the library and CTE labs on either side, feeding into smaller learning communities.
That is the architectural version of saying: yes, the building is going to be huge, but please don’t make it feel like an airport terminal.
The design team said exactly that in cleaner consultant language. “This is going to be a big building, no doubt about it,” one presenter said, “but… the design exercise is to make it feel small.”
Fair enough. A large high school that feels anonymous is a problem. A large high school that feels navigable is at least trying to solve one.
The educational logic behind the layout was stated pretty plainly, and for once the plain explanation was better than the buzzwords. The presenter said students do better when they have “meaningful connections with the grown ups” who care about them. The building, they said, should not get “in the way of students having meaningful connections with their teachers.”
That is one of the more useful sentences heard in a public meeting lately. Not every design presentation needs to sound like a TED Talk audition. Sometimes the point is simple: if kids can be known by actual adults in the building, the school works better.
The library was pitched in similarly aspirational terms. The presenter said if it feels like something you might find in “a college setting,” that is “a good one,” because the idea is to create “aspirational places” for students.
There is nothing wrong with that idea. Working-class kids in Everett do not need lower expectations wrapped in therapeutic language. They need buildings that tell them, by design, that they are worth serious investment too.
The presenters also made the point that not every student is heading to college, and the building should support more than one future. The stated goal was helping students become “a good civic citizen,” participate in public life, and maybe get “a job in industry that will make the lives of the community just a little bit better.”
Again, good. A school should prepare students for college, trades, work, and civic life. It should not be built around one professional-class fantasy and call that equity.
Outdoor space got attention too. Not just fields or passive green space, but areas that could act as “an extension of the labs,” including environmental learning opportunities. That sounds fine on paper. The real question, later, will be maintenance. A lot of nice educational features look great in renderings and then turn into locked doors or dead space once the operating budget shows up.
One notable planning scenario discussed was what happens if the existing building stays and gets repurposed as a middle school. In that version, the presenters said a connecting “plaza becomes the mediator” between old and new buildings, allowing middle school students access to higher-level high school resources when appropriate.
That is the kind of phrase architects love — “the plaza becomes the mediator” — but underneath it is a real planning issue. If Everett keeps part of the current structure, how do the buildings relate? How do students move? Who gets access to what, and when? Those are not cosmetic questions.
The gym, for its part, was described as taking “a primary stage.” No argument there. In any public school building, the gym winds up doing a lot more than hosting classes. It becomes event space, tournament space, graduation overflow space, and neighborhood public-use space whether anyone says it out loud or not.
And that public-use question did come up.
The design team raised the possibility of “bringing partners into this building where community services can be administered,” centered in a civic space on the south side of the site. That may prove useful. It also deserves more specifics than it got here. Which partners? What services? During school hours? After hours? For students, families, the general public, all three? “Community services” can mean anything from sensible wraparound support to expensive space programming with no clear operator.
A speaker identified as Bell closed part of the pitch by stressing qualifications and client trust. “Our relationships with our clients are really important,” Bell said. Bell also said the team has “the exact experience that you need,” including “a history of cost control” with “design quality,” and the “bandwidth and the capability” to handle not just this project but also broader master planning.
That is what firms say when they are asking a city to trust them with a very expensive job. The claim that matters most there is cost control. Nice renderings are easy. Cost control is where these projects live or die for taxpayers.
The meeting then moved toward questions, with the facilitator saying, “We’ll open it up for any questions.”
What was missing from the portion provided was any real stress test of the presentation. The design ideas were clear enough. The money, phasing, tradeoffs, and long-term operating implications are what need harder public discussion next. Big building, aspirational spaces, civic services, outdoor labs, middle school reuse — fine. How much, how staged, and who pays for what over time? That is the part working people in Everett eventually have to live with.