Hard Hats and Smiles at Ground-Breaking

Men in hard hats were busy constructing one of the new additions to Fairfield Woods Middle School Friday morning, while others wearing hard hats – Fairfield Woods Principal Greg Hatzis, Malkin Construction executives, Board of Education members, even 10 FWMS students – were gathering for a ground-breaking ceremony next to the site.

“This is the tenth ground-breaking I’ve taken part in – and the last,” smiled a hard-hatless First Selectman Ken Flatto, after joining several others to put shovels into the dirt for the day’s photo-op.

The middle school’s $24.2 million expansion and renovation, well under way, will total 26,400 square feet on two floors. The project encompasses 13 new classrooms, a 600-seat auditorium, an occupational and physical therapy classroom, additions to the cafeteria and kitchen, renovations to the school library and improvements related to the Americans with Disabilities Act.

“The first phase, the cafeteria and the classrooms, will be ready Sept. 1,” said William Sapone, chairman of the Building Committee. “The auxiliary gym and the auditorium are scheduled to be completed by January or February (of 2012).”

Flatto, who has served as Fairfield’s first selectman for nearly 12 of the past 14 years, will relinquish his position at the end of the month. On May 2, he will begin his new job as executive director of the state’s Division of Special Revenue, based in Newington.

“This is a turning point in this town – the end of a cycle for big building projects,” he said.

The first selectman began to reel off some of the other major ground-breaking ceremonies in which he took part – the construction of Roger Ludlowe Middle School and Burr Elementary School, renovations to the town’s main library and Stratfield Elementary School, the building of the town’s third railroad station …“along with a bunch of Open Spaces.

“We didn’t need a shovel for them,” he grinned.

Major construction projects aside, Flatto believes the most impressive accomplishment  that took place under his watch was the renovation and reopening of the town’s second high school, now Fairfield Ludlowe, in 2001. In the previous 14 years, students in the four upper grades had one option for a public high school – Fairfield H.S., now called Fairfield Warde.

“With two high schools in town,  so many more children have had a chance to excel,” he said. “National Honor Society. Through athletics, clubs, music programs.

“From the 1970s to the early ‘90s, our town infrastructure shrunk. Since the ‘90s until now, there has been one major project after another. Now I think we’re entering a period of stability.”

Last October, the Board of Education, in a unanimous vote (9-0), approved the plans and specifications for the ambitious Fairfield Woods project.