AI-generated transcript of MHS Building Project Space Summary

[Jenny Graham]: Hi, everyone. I'm Jenny Graham. I'm the chair of the Medford Comprehensive High School Building Committee. And here with me is our principal architect. His name is Matt Rice from SMMA. Matt, thanks for joining me.

[Matt Rice]: Thank you. Yes, again, my name is Matt Rice, architect and principal in charge with SMMA. We are the designers for the new Medford High School project.

[Jenny Graham]: And we're here today to talk about a couple of different things that I think have been persistent questions from the community as we have gone through the beginning stages of this process to re-envision Medford High. And specifically, we're at the point in the feasibility study where we're looking at in lots of detail every nook and cranny of the space that we have and starting to say what kind of space do we need in the new building. So I'm going to let Matt describe that process and where we are in the feasibility study to kick us off.

[Matt Rice]: Thanks Jenny. So the key challenge that we have right now is to understand how big is the new building going to be. And the way that we do that is by generating something called a space summary. The space summary is an itemized list, an inventory of every single occupied space that can be found within the new high school building. We're planning for both what is here at the high school today as well as projecting forward. to understand what are the goals and the desires for new spaces that might be brought to the building. The space summary includes both occupied spaces as well as unoccupied spaces, things like stairs, hallways, mechanical rooms, everything that is needed to support the building. And when we combine both the occupied spaces and the non-occupied spaces, that gives us the overall building size.

[Jenny Graham]: And I think if you are following closely or paying attention to what's happening with the building committee, you know that just a few days ago, we released a draft of that document. So that document is now available along with some explanation of the many, many rows and columns on there. And before the end of February, we will finalize that document and submit it to the MSBA to keep moving through our feasibility study deliverables. Since we've done that, there's lots of questions that I think people have always had and now are sort of having a chance to look at the details of that space summary and say, this isn't what I thought of when I thought of these spaces in Medford High today. I asked Matt to join me and we're going to take this show on the road just a little bit to talk to some students and teachers where we can to do a little bit of myth busting, if you will, and really set the record straight on what the facts of the process so far have told us. think the people of Medford are really interested in this project. There's lots and lots of energy and I think making sure that we are talking about we're all grounded in the same set of facts about what the building is today and how we are planning for the future is super important at this stage. So we're going to talk a little bit about a couple of like common questions that we're hearing and if you hear anything that brings up more questions, please feel free to reach out. And if there are enough other things to talk about, we'll come and do another session here sometime soon. But we've got some big ticket items, so I think we'll be OK.