New Building Design is based in Personal Experience and Person First Mentality

Elowyn Wells and Kyra Bast | Editor and Chief and Staff Writer

Influences on New Design

The new building for Lindbergh has been a project that has taken the skill of many different fields in order to create a safe environment that promotes learning. Through the work of Introba, BSI Constructors, and Lindbergh staff, the redesigned school has been acclaimed to be one of the safest in the country, according to the project managers.

“I have three girls who were in middle school and high school when Sandy Hook happened, which was about fifteen miles from my house. So, school security is near and dear to my heart for a lot of reasons, not to mention it was literally in my backyard, so to speak.” Phil Santore has stated where his desire to design safe, comfortable, and effective buildings came from. In order to preserve this “educational mission,” he has detailed what criteria must be followed to make this possible.

“We kind of live with what we call the D’s: Deter, delay, dispatch, and we hope we never get to the last one which is defend,” Santore detailed, “when we talk about attack it’s about life safety, we don’t care what happens, we don’t care how damaged the building is, it’s all about people.”

Santore mentioned how he and the rest of the team working on the new building designed it with one goal in mindproviding students a safe and productive learning environment.

“Young folks are the future of who I once was, what my kids will be, and you and your kids will be,” Santore said. “If we mess up that mission, then we really all fail as consultants and architects and design engineers and all of those things.”

Safety Implimentation

When asked about how security has been integrated into our school, Santore referenced the work he had done on Sandy Hook.

“If you were to walk through Sandy Hook school, and even your school, you’re only gonna see about 50% of what’s in place in Lindbergh.”

Steven Schrage gave his input into how the high school is prioritizing safety in the new building.

“When fully completed, the high school will have secure entrances and students will be able to travel to every classroom and activity space within the secure building.”

Phill Santore described the ideas that safety consultants keep when designing security measures in any building.

“If we just think about it in simplistic terms, it’s about securing your building, knowing who’s coming into your building, knowing that you can secure and monitor it, knowing that you can call for help, and then creating areas and processes for things when they happen, so when something happens, just like when the fire alarm goes off, everybody has fire drills, we know what to do.”

When asked how they would assure the students of Lindbergh on the safety of the new building, Santore said, “Your school is one of the safest designed, engineered, and built schools with respect to the physical and electronic hardware.” Scott Barbagallo commented, “Nobody really had a school building that looked like this.”