Thomas Snell Weaver High School will reopen Tuesday following a $133 million renovation to overhaul the drab, windowless Hartford public school that has loomed over Granby Street since the 1970s.
Redesigned to be a modern, inviting centerpiece of its North End neighborhood, the new Weaver campus is home to the Journalism and Media Academy, relocating from Tower Avenue; High School Inc., an insurance and finance academy relocating from leased space downtown; and the Richard J. Kinsella Performing Arts High School, moving from Locust Street in the South Meadows.
About 900 students will share amenities, classes and sports teams.
The auditorium and several specialty rooms are still under construction or awaiting finishing touches, and renovations to the Doc Hurley Field House, where the gymnasium is located, will be completed in 2020. For now, the field house facade is a mix of exposed cinder blocks, plywood and house-wrap.
Academic portions of the school are finished, and on Thursday, teachers and staff began filtering in to prepare their classrooms and offices for the first day of school Tuesday.
By Friday afternoon, succulents lined the window of the state-of-the-art biology lab and a small herd of glass, ceramic and beanbag turtles decorated the graphic arts lab, equipped with 3D printers and iMac computers.
In the musical theater room, drama teacher Ryan Howland listened to disco while he used clothespins and string to hang photos of former students and performances. He taped a an audition sign-up sheet for “Urinetown: The Musical” to the door.
The performance studio is one of the many upgrades of the new Weaver campus. A mirror fills one wall, and the black flooring will offer some give to dancing feet. Howland, a fifth-year teacher with Kinsella, spent his Friday decorating so students would still find something familiar about their new surroundings.
“I just want to make sure, with them moving into a new school, it had a piece of what they’ve done already,” Howland said.
The four-story school building offers plenty of other amenities for Kinsella students, including a black-box theater, scenery-building shop, and set storage. In the same wing will be the new nerve center for 89.9 WQTQ FM, the high school radio station licensed to the Hartford Board of Education, with a radio studio, and audio control and interview rooms.
Those spaces, like the auditorium, are still a work in progress, but most of the school will be ready for students.
The striking transformation starts outside, where Weaver’s old facade has been redesigned in clean black and white with ample windows.
The main stretch of the building that once held boxy rows of stairwells five stories tall, now features a main entrance with added security and views of the pristine athletic field.
Inside, the cafeteria, a lounge-like media center and lockers are accented in blue, green and orange. Long, empty display cases stand ready for trophies. A few airy, open spaces offer workstations and chairs for students to gather.
On the first floor, the school’s new medical clinic is equipped with a lab for vaccines and testing; a dental suite where a hygienist and dentist will visit to provide cleanings, X-rays, sealants and fillings; and waiting and resting rooms.
Construction began in the summer of 2017.
The state plans to reimburse Hartford up to 95 percent of the $133 million renovation cost because one of the high school’s three academies is Kinsella, a performing arts magnet school that enrolls both city and suburban students under Connecticut’s Sheff v. O’Neill desegregation agreement.
Rebecca Lurye can be reached at rlurye@courant.com.
