It didn’t take long to spot Matt Eberhardt after I pulled into a gravelly parking lot off Idlewild Boulevard on Friday morning.
“I like the hard hat,” I told Eberhardt, Fredericksburg’s Deputy Superintendent of Schools. “It’s a good look.”
“You’re going to be putting one on in a second,” he shot back.
Safety was a priority at all times when present on the active construction site for the city’s new middle school, which is slated to open on July 23, 2025, ahead of the 2025-26 school year. The Free Press accompanied a group of FCPS educators and administrators on a tour of the school building and surrounding 26-acre property.
After tightening hard hats, zipping up reflective vests and adjusting safety glasses, we set out.
My immediate reaction, and, judging by the “wows” and other spontaneous utterances coming from my companions — a widely shared one — was the sheer size of the building. At 160,000 square feet, the new Walker-Grant Middle School (the old building will get a new name when it transitions into an elementary school) will have a capacity of 1,100 students.
After walking the future bus loop around the left side of the building, we funneled into a first-floor entrance. Progress has been brisk since English Construction Company broke ground on the $74.8 million project last May as part of a public-private partnership with Moseley Architects.
Still, it required a bit of imagination to envision the skeletal framework of steel beams and bricks as a finished learning space. Fortunately, Eberhardt and Sean Dalton, Moseley’s program director, helped fill in the gaps.
We passed a pair of sensory rooms, which will be outfitted to help special needs students. The void at the center of a mammoth art room will eventually house a pair of kilns for firing students’ pottery. One feature — an outdoor patio adjacent to the cafeteria — drew its inspiration from COVID-era socially distant lunches.
Sixth-grade classrooms are on the ground floor, while seventh and eighth graders will be housed on the second floor. At the top of a central staircase, Eberhardt paused to point out a flat surface to be covered with a mural, potentially one painted by students.
The second floor also offered a pristine view of the courtyard, which is the largest of its kind undertaken by English. Stepping purposely over the uneven ground, we were able to get a sense of what the space could become.
It was around that point in the tour that something became pretty clear to me: the educators whose tour I was crashing like their jobs and each other. “Family” is thrown around to the point of hollowness in professional settings, but I think it’s appropriate here.
There was talk of purchasing trellises for planters to accompany the courtyard’s hardscaping. You could tell they could picture themselves — and their students — using the space.
The group included Steve Ventura, Walker-Grant’s first-year principal. Ventura explained that he started his career as a teacher at the middle school and later became an assistant principal there.
He recalled how enthusiastic his sixth graders were last year when FCPS held a furniture fair with four vendors to select pieces for the new building. As eighth graders, they’ll be the first ones to use it.
After 35 minutes and a few group photos, we headed back to the parking lot. It was still a bustling construction zone, but the anticipation had already been built.
“We’ve seen lots of drawings, but to see it today was pretty breathtaking,” Ventura said.
