New Northern Middle opens in Calvert County
Calvert public schools’ Superintendent Marcus Newsome noted it had been 22 months since his predecessor and other school and community leaders did the traditional moving of dirt with golden shovels. And now the new Northern Middle School has opened for learning. The project, which was slowed by weather and challenges in obtaining building materials, cost nearly $60 million, which was a combination of state and county funds. The three-story, 109,237-square-foot building, co-located with Northern High on Chaneyville Road in Owings, can accommodate 800 students. With its current enrollment at 715 there’s room for more, although it’s still Calvert County’s most populous middle school. “It takes every department in the school system to make this happen,” the superintendent said during his monthly report to the Calvert County school board Nov. 5. In a matter of hours, the new building went from being a storage site for unopened boxes and bare shelves into a new school. Newsome credited school staff, assisted by honor students from Northern High, with the move from the old school to the new building. “It’s looking amazing,” Ruth Ollie Reist, a Northern High junior and current student member of the board, said of the new facility. Reist was
