Phoenix Academy Public Charter School
Springfield, MA
The Phoenix Academy Charter School offers a non-traditional yet rigorous educational program to place at-risk students on a track to attend 4-year colleges and vocational schools.
With school locations already in Chelsea and Lawrence, MA, when Phoenix expanded to include a third school, they selected the Springfield Technical Park - and more specifically the site of the repurposed Springfield Armory - for its home.
Western Builders was selected to construct the 31,000 sq ft high school. The project was part of the larger $9 million demolition and reconstruction of the nationally historic Springfield Armory Building 104, where the M1 Garand rifles were mass produced in the 1940s in the efforts to win the WWII war. The Phoenix Academy Charter School was a three-phase project on the National Park site. It required not only the orchestration around a University of Massachusetts archeological dig, but also close coordination to meet project goals set by the National Park Service and the Massachusetts Historical Commission.
