Eagle Hill's $15M Center Set To Open This School Year | 42,000-square-foot building will seat 500
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Eagle Hill School's new performing arts center.
When officials at Eagle Hill School in Hardwick started planning a new performing arts center and dining hall, they figured it would be finished in 2010.
As it turns out, the new building will open by the start of the coming school year, thanks to a surprisingly quick fundraising campaign.
Finance First
P.J. McDonald, the school’s headmaster, said Eagle Hill has already raised the $15.2 million that it needed for the project, 95 percent of it from parents, alumni and others with personal ties to the school. The school used a bond from Rollstone Bank in Fitchburg to move construction forward smoothly, paying it back as pledges came in.
McDonald said the school wants the new 42,100-square foot, 500-seat cultural center to draw visitors from as far away as Worcester and Amherst with performances, speakers and political debates. Lamoureux Pagano Associates, the lead architect for the Hanover Theatre renovation in Worcester, designed the building.
Jeff Navin, a project executive with Consigli Construction, which is building the project, said its unusual features include a grand stairway, a two-story mural made by the school’s students and a granite exterior.
“It’s not that often you see a true stone building anymore,” Navin said.
The building also includes the kitchen that serves the school’s 150 students, as well as a woodshop, graphic design lab and music room that will help students participate in the day-to-day life of the cultural center. McDonald said students will build sets and stages, create marketing materials and do web design for the center. Eagle Hill serves teenagers with learning disabilities, and McDonald said that’s a group that can benefit particularly from that kind of practical learning.
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