Open concept era ends: Stowe puts up walls for safety, learning

According to superintendent Ryan Heraty, school safety topped the list of reasons to build them.

“I think that was one of our main drivers, just the ability to make sure that, in any emergency, we could go into a lockdown or shelter in place,” Heraty said Monday while showing off the new features.

Once upon a time, the lack of walls seemed like a throwback to groovier times, where barriers were things meant to break down.

Former English teacher Tom Curtin, in an interview with the Stowe Reporter on the eve of his retirement in 2011, recalled applying for the job shortly after moving to Vermont in the 1970s.

“I observed a class here,” Curtin said. “It was all open classrooms, no doors or walls. I liked the atmosphere of the openness, the ’70s hippie mentality that was going on. It was distracting, but exciting. You would bring in people because something exciting was going on in your classroom.”

In March 2018, a month after a mass shooting at a high school in Parkland left 17 people dead, a discussion a school safety at Stowe High School touched on the lack of walls in the high school classrooms. Stowe police had been increasing their presence in and around schools to build familiarity and trust with students, and cited the lack of walls as a weakness that could be strengthened.

Stowe students who participated that month in a planned nationwide walkout to protest weak gun laws noted that the wall situation was something of a running joke, but their concerns about the mobile, impermanent cabinets that passed as barriers were real concerns.

Besides safety, the open-air feel that may have once been fashionable for fostering creative connectedness has also, for some, brought more chaos into an already chaotic world.

Stowe high and middle schools have a somewhat byzantine layout, and the second floor houses the always-busy library with high school classrooms circling it. The old stereotype of a library being a quiet place to study doesn’t ring true when you’ve got a science class talking about atoms, a social studies class talking about John Adams and a literature class talking about Madame Defarge, all at the same time, all into the open air.

“We did some classroom observations this year and it was extremely distracting,” Heraty said.

Teacher Roger Murphy has been at Stowe High for more than a quarter century, and he personally didn’t mind the open concept — he said educators were able to pop in and out of classrooms to observe other teachers or students without interrupting, and a school without walls made for a less isolated feel. However, he acknowledged it created more issues than benefits, pointing to one of the biggest classrooms, now properly walled off.

“This room used to be the Latin room, now it’s the Spanish room, and there’s always interactive games, singing, and everything,” he said. “If anything was happening in the Spanish room, it was happening in every room.”

Just the beginning?

The wall construction was paid for with money already allocated within the budget. It was projected to cost a half million dollars and came in around $400,000, Heraty said.

The project is just a taste of what might be coming for the school, and for taxpayers.

According to Heraty, a Stowe school district committee tasked with looking at facilities needs is looking to ask Stowe voters to approve a bond for a much more comprehensive overhaul of the middle/high school.

Heraty said it’s too early for him to name anything but a ballpark figure, but the committee estimates that middle and high school renovations could be done for somewhere in the low-to-mid $20 million range and could be proposed to voters as early as November.

The estimate in late 2018 then topped $40 million, but it also included renovations to Stowe Elementary School. All hopes of approaching voters with a bond request for that were dashed within days of the committee’s findings. That’s when the state Board of Education forced Stowe into a merger with sister school districts Morristown and Elmore, an educational governance marriage that was finally annulled last summer by that same board. One of the reasons for Stowe’s withdrawal from the merged Lamoille South district? Elmore and Morristown voters didn’t want to shoulder the costs for Stowe’s school improvements.

Heraty said the walls are a good start in showing Stowe students that the district is invested in their education and the place they get it.

“I think that environment plays a huge role in how students feel about their school, and how they are connected to their surroundings,” Heraty said.