Projects Arlene Meraux Elementary

Arlene Meraux Elementary

Educational | Municipal Facility

As always Gibbs Construction resolved difficult problems professionally and delivered the project on time for the St. Bernard Parish School Board. As construction manager for the School Board, I saw the dedication for you and your staff first hand and appreciate the job that you've done for the students of St. Bernard.
Albert J. Carey, Jr. AIA

Arlene Meraux Elementary School is a 115,000-square-foot state-of-the-art new facility that opened its doors to nearly 550 students in August 2017. It was the final school project of the St. Bernard Parish School Board’s rebuilding program necessitated by 2005’s Hurricane Katrina, which flooded every building in St. Bernard Parish. Gibbs Construction also built the first St. Bernard Parish School Board project immediately after Katrina – with the same architect – and went on to complete the majority of the projects in the massive rebuilding program. The Meraux school was the 13th project Gibbs Construction, Lachin Architects and the SBPSB completed together.

The new school contains Smart Board-equipped classrooms (including an outdoor classroom), a library, art room, teachers’ rooms, lounge, music room, two time-out rooms, conference rooms, a large commercial kitchen, calming rooms, two courtyards, and computer labs.

The design also incorporates a cafetorium – a combined cafeteria and auditorium with a full stage with curtain, projection screen, projector, and lighting — and gymnasium and playground equipment.

The structural steel and masonry school is skinned in metal panels and acoustical aluminum composite panels with brick veneer. Significant finishes include glazed block, patterned five-color terrazzo floors, and cast stone sills on all windows and bases at the aluminum composite panel demising walls.

The facility has both modified bitumen and standing seam roof systems, and barreled structural canopies with translucent roof panels in addition to aluminum canopies.

The school sits on a 14.6-acre plot of land in Chalmette donated to the St. Bernard Parish School Board by the Arlene and Joseph Meraux Charitable Foundation. As a nod to Joseph Meraux, who had a large and significant collection of antique clocks, a 46-foot-tall clock tower is purposefully the most visible feature of the campus from the road. The clock tower is cast in place concrete with brick veneer, aluminum cladded panels, and glass fiber reinforced concrete (GFRC) panels.

The school’s bee mascot was included in the design not only in the logo-emblazoned terrazzo floors but also in a lobby wall installation of 100 cast glass bees commissioned from local artist Mitchell Gaudet. The mascot is also represented in a feature of the exterior brickwork: multiple colors of glazed brick are arranged in a way as to depict a swarm of bees.