NEWINGTON - The John Wallace aerospace engineering STEM academy’s inaugural class of 25 seventh grade students has been at work in the newly-renovated former shop space since the beginning of October. Last week, parents, educators and elected officials got a chance to see the facility.

       Newington Schools celebrated the completion of the space, which features flight simulators, mini runways and a portable pool for landing water-born aircrafts, with a ribbon cutting ceremony at 6 p.m. last Thursday.

       â€�"It’s a great day for the Newington school system,” said Board of Education Chair Marc Finkelstein. â€�"It’s a great day for the town of Newington.”

       The 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 were the first to open a biomedical academy at the middle school level, and we’re also the first to open an aerospace academy at the middle school level,” said Superintendent of Schools Bill Collins. â€�"We like to blaze our own trail.”

       And Finkelstein credits Collins for drawing the road map.

       â€�"This was his vision,” he said. â€�"They were just ideas-and now they’ve reached fruition.”

       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.

       Collins and Finkelstein thanked residents for their support in seeing the project through to its completion.

       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.

       â€�"Our students are learning higher-level thinking that will open many career paths to them,” said John Wallace Middle School Principal David Milardo. â€�"They have an opportunity to experience middle school in ways that many other students do not.”

       And the group of residents and officials, state and local, got a taste of that experience touring a facility equipped with flight simulators, multiple classroom/planning spaces and a 3D printer. The flight simulators were the biggest draw, with visitors crowding behind Academy students who showed them the ropes.

       â€�"What the simulators are used for is learning how things fly,” said Program Director Brian Holmes. â€�"So when they design or build an aircraft, they know how the wing works. They know how to make it fly the way they want it to fly.”

       And while the laws of flight provide the foundation, the curriculum is all about thinking outside the box, Holmes said.

       â€�"When kids have a lab or project, I give them as few guidelines as possible,” he said. â€�"So they have to come up with their own approach to tackling the problem.”