Medford building committee releases draft space summary for new high school, plans MSBA submission

Jenny Graham, chair of the Medford Comprehensive High School Building Committee, said the committee released a draft "space summary" for the proposed new Medford High School and will finalize the document before the end of February and submit it to the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA).

"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," said Matt Rice, architect and principal in charge with SMMA. "The space summary is an itemized list, an inventory of every single occupied space..." Rice said the summary also counts nonoccupied supporting areas such as stairs, hallways and mechanical rooms; combining both sets of counts produces the overall projected building size.

The committee released a draft of that space summary a few days before the session and made it available for public review, Graham said. She and Rice said the finalized space summary will be submitted to the MSBA as part of the feasibility-study deliverables that govern the next design and funding steps.

Graham told attendees the draft has generated questions from residents who find some counts different from their expectations, and she framed the session as an effort to "myth-bust" and ensure the public and project team are "grounded in the same set of facts" about existing and future spaces. She also said the committee plans to visit students and teachers to explain the findings and invited community members to reach out with questions.

The presentation clarified that the space summary covers both "occupied spaces" — classrooms, labs, offices — and "unoccupied spaces" such as circulation and mechanical rooms, which the designers include when calculating the building's gross size. The committee did not announce a revised timetable for construction, financing or MSBA approval; those steps depend on subsequent feasibility reporting and MSBA review.

The committee said additional public sessions will be scheduled if there are further questions. The draft space summary is available to the public for review; community members seeking details were asked to contact the committee for follow-up.