Dodson & Flinker is pleased to announce that our landscape design for The Raymond E. Shaw Elementary School in Millbury, MA, received an honor award in the landscape category from the Western Massachusetts American Institute of Architects/Boston Society of Landscape Architects Design Awards 2024. The new, certified LEED Gold school building and landscape replaces an aging, mid-20th century school building. D&F served as a landscape architectural subconsultant to T2 Architecture for this project. The building and landscape design are inspired by the threads of natural and cultural history, visible and invisible, that give meaning to the site: from agricultural patterns still visible in stone walls, to native plant wetland and forest communities, to mill power and products. The school landscape is designed to provide outdoor learning and play beyond recess, with outdoor classroom spaces and interpretive features that include a meadow walk, a constructed wetland, sloped playground with embankment slides and interconnected nets, a forest classroom and trail, and a stormwater runnel wall and waterwheel driven by roof runoff.