Old Colony Archives
Old Colony seniors give cemetery new look
By Lauren Daley, Standard-Times correspondent
May 27, 2005
ACUSHNET -- Luke Leonard gazed at the new Acushnet Cemetery office building. He smiled, looking at its Grecian columns, its newly shingled roof, its walls, its fresh coat of cream paint and its new gable, adorned with a copper and glass lantern.
"I'm amazed that students did this. It looked like a garage before," said Mr. Leonard, secretary/treasurer of the Acushnet Cemetery Board of Trustees.
The students to whom Mr. Leonard refers are four senior girls from Old Colony Vocational-Technical High School, who designed the blueprints during their sophomore year as part of their Computer Aided Drafting class project.
Jackie Hebert, 17, along with her classmates Barbara Masse, 17, Ashley Harrington, 18, and Katy Hagerty, 18, were assigned the project of redesigning the cemetery office when they were sophomores by their shop teacher, Diniz Brum.
Two years later, as the girls prepare for graduation, the transformation of the once-drab, cement office is almost complete -- it only needs a few new windows. When all the dust settles, the project will have cost the cemetery about $40,000.
"It was absolutely nothing. A box," said Ms. Herbert, who will major in interior design at Becker College in Worchester in the fall.
"It was so cool to create something that would actually be able to be used by people," she said. "It's like, 'Hey I built that!'...You feel proud."
Ray Rivet, the cemetery's head groundskeeper, said the building was in desperate need of a pick-me-up.
"The office was built in 1958 and this is really the first thing we've done to it," he said. "We wanted it to look a little more like an office and a little less like a garage."
"It was a flat, old, ugly cement building, and they've completely enhanced it," Mr. Leonard said.
"People would ask me where the office was. When I told them this building, they said, 'That's an office?'" he laughed.
Mr. Brum said he was approached by Mr. Rivet, who asked if shop students could remodel the cement building.
"I took the class down as a field trip so they could meet with the clients and take their own measurements," he said. "Then they had to draw the existing conditions and develop a new (design) to present to Mr. Rivet and Mr. Leonard."
"I want them to see the end results of their work and say, 'Wow, I did that?'" said Mr. Brum, who teaches architechtual design to freshmen and sophomores at Old Colony, and who himself is an architechtual designer.
"It was nice to see (Mr. Leonard's and Mr. Rivet's) faces when they saw it," Ms. Hagerty said. "They were smiling. Seeing their faces was really rewarding.
"Since I was little, I was always building with (blocks) and drawing," she said. "Seeing this, I really feel like I can do it in the real world."
After the girls took measurements, they designed their blueprints on an architechtual computer program called Autocad 2000-I. They drew up a key plan, a new front design, new roof and a new floor plan, among other designs.
"We were in the shop room 6 hours a day for two weeks," Ms. Harrington said.
"It was a lot of work, but it was worth it," Ms. Masse said. "Plus, we got an A."
Image: PETER PEREIRA/The Standard-Times
Old Colony drafting students, from left, Barbara Masse, Jackie Herbert, Ashley Harrington and Katie Hagerty discuss different plans they came up with when they were asked to design a new roof line for the Acushnet Cemetery office.