NEWINGTON - Students at John Wallace’s aerospace engineering STEM academy entered the finished facility last week and the public will get its first look at the newly renovated former wood shop space Oct. 22.

       The Rare Reminder spoke with Superintendent of Schools Bill Collins about two weeks before, when contractors were putting the finishing touches on the space.

       â€�"It looks great,” Collins said. â€�"I was in the facility yesterday and it looks fantastic. So we’re on the home stretch and I’m looking forward to the grand opening.”

       So the students won’t be the first to see it after all, but they’ll serve as tour guides to the facility once residents, as well as state and local officials visit the school three weeks after the aerospace engineering program begins holding classes in the space, Collins said.

       â€�"We want to give them a few weeks to get used to it so they can show us around,” he said.

       The academy’s space will include a classroom area, flight simulators, runways and a portable pool for landing water-borne aircrafts.

       Its opening marks the end of Newington’s second STEM-related renovation project. The biomedical engineering academy at Martin Kellogg Middle School launched last year with its first class of 25 seventh-graders. This one will also start with 25, with both growing to 50 students total, split between the seventh and eighth grades, by their second year.

       â€�"We want to thank the community,” Collins said. â€�"They put a lot of faith and a lot of money into this, so we want to make sure we pull through for them.”

       On the money side, the actual renovations of the former shop space cost $550,000. When PCBs were discovered in the paint within corners of the facility, the Board of Education opted for a $1.5 million abatement plan that involved taking the walls down.

       Not removing the substances would have left the district with $60,000 in annual remediation costs.

       Additional abatement work pushed the academy’s opening back about a month, but the program itself has been running since the start of school in late August. Students have already been on the flight simulators, and many of the curriculum’s earliest components do not require them to be physically in the lab space, Collins said.

       Meanwhile, Newington prepares to become the first public school district in the state to have an aerospace engineering program at one of its middle schools.

       â€�"It feels great,” Collins said. â€�"The two fastest-growing industries in Connecticut are aerospace and biomedical science, and we have them both. We want to make sure our kids are prepared for the world that they’ll enter.”

       Between 2012 and 2022, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects a 7 percent growth in the number of aerospace engineering-related jobs nationwide. In biomedical engineering, the anticipated increase is even higher. The Bureau projects 27 percent growth for the 2012-22 time period.

       While the projected growth for biomedical engineering jobs is considered by the Bureau to be faster than average when compared to all other fields, the anticipated increase for aerospace is on the slow end, they say.

       While the need for aerospace engineers in national defense projects, and the consequential security clearance requirement for many of those jobs, will help to keep some of the work from being outsourced, a struggling manufacturing industry has curbed some of the job opportunity growth in the field as well, according to the Bureau’s occupation profile.