Kirsten Hull
Senior Consultant
K-12 Education | Market Co-Leader
Stoneham High School, designed by Perkins&Will, is a 207,000-square-foot facility that supports a forward-looking vision for education through high-performance design and strong connections to its natural surroundings. Located adjacent to the Middlesex Fells Reservation, the LEED Silver, Net-Positive Energy building is thoughtfully sited to engage with the surrounding landscape while providing a wide array of academic, arts, and athletic spaces. These include general and specialized classrooms and labs, music and art suites including a video production studio, an auditorium, a black box theater, a library/media center with an emphasis on virtual and group learning, a makerspace, gymnasium, and an early learning center.
Acentech provided acoustics, noise, and vibration consulting services with a strong emphasis on the design of the school’s performing arts spaces, including the auditorium, which the school would like to use for the Massachusetts Educational Theater Guild’s High School Drama Festival. Acentech helped develop room shaping strategies and provided preliminary acoustic design concepts to support speech clarity and performance versatility. Carefully designed ceiling and wall reflectors help project and distribute sound evenly throughout the audience area, enhancing both speech intelligibility and musical performance. Retractable stage reflectors are incorporated into the theatrical rigging, which can be brought in to enhance ensemble communication and flown out when not needed. These acoustic attributes can be fully appreciated due to the very low ambient noise in the space, which required careful coordination and detailing to mitigate the impact of numerous air handlers and condensing units on a low roof behind the stage.
Beyond the auditorium, we supported a high-quality learning environment throughout the school by designing sound-isolating construction between classrooms and incorporating sound-absorbing finishes to control reverberation and overall noise levels. We also helped define limits for community noise emissions and developed mitigation measures to ensure the new building maintains the serenity of the surrounding area.
Through these strategies, the project achieves key acoustical goals of clarity, privacy, and flexibility, contributing to a comfortable, distraction-free environment that supports teaching, learning, and community engagement.
