Dennis Daly's Thoughts on the School Building Project

Dennis Daly, a Duxbury resident, is the lead project architect on our proposed school building project. We asked him his thoughts on the project. Here is what he had to say:


A Special Opportunity

The chance to design the new Co-Located Middle and High School is an important challenge for me as an architect, and an exciting privilege as a Duxbury resident. Our civic buildings are an important way in which we express who we are, and our schools express the importance we see in educating ourchildren and investing in the future.

Duxbury is rich in history and tradition. The original configuration of our town's symbolic center features three buildings that our predecessors saw as most important and expressive of who they were. The First Parish Church, Town Hall and Partridge Academy stood side by side as Duxbury’s Spiritual, Governmental
and Educational Temples. As times and needs changed, so did our buildings. When the Partridge Academy burned down in 1933, the original Duxbury High School built in 1927 and now the home of the Duxbury Free Library had, already replaced its need. That was the beginning of what has become a vibrant cultural and educational campus. We are now engaged in the further development of that campus with our generation's contribution to a rich tradition.

The Co-Located Middle and High School will complete a campus plan in which all students from grade three through grade twelve as well as Duxbury residents at large can share in utilizing all the amenities offered in this one place. The design of the building is developed in response to the requirement of creating two separate schools, a Middle School (grades 6-8) and a High School (grades 9-12). The building is to be composed of four component parts. The first and defining part is the central spine or “Main Street” upon which the other three parts, High School, Middle School and Community buildings are arranged. These components will each have their own identity, and address along “Main Street”. This new symbolic village center has been designed to fulfill the educational needs of our Middle and High School students as well providing community spaces that are not only educational but also provide cultural and social opportunities available to all our citizens.

As taxpayers in this wonderful community my wife Linda and I have enjoyed watching our older son and  daughter reap the benefits of a first class public education and enter college as proud graduates of Duxbury  Junior Senior High School (remember that?) an old and tired building even then in 1998, and our younger son attend both the Middle School and High School as a member of the Pilgrim Area Collaborative and enjoyed the special gift of the “Best Buddies” program. We got our monies worth because of the vision of the town’s residents in the 1960’s and the sacrifices they made. Now as our surrounding communities take advantage of the opportunities that the Massachusetts School Building Authority provides with generous reimbursements by building new state of the art schools to replace buildings as old or younger than ours, we understand that it’s
our turn to provide for the younger families that follow us.