by andrea xu’25
Have you wondered what keeps St. Mark’s running? Do you ever wonder what the lives of the custodians and the facility staff ever are like? Who pulls the string of the heating system? Who takes care of the fire alarm?
To answer these questions, the Exploring the Archive club toured the power plants, sewage treatment plants, and the underground tunnels on-campus on January 11th. As the founder of the club, I wanted to get a glimpse of what these publicly “invisible” spaces have to offer, and share them with the members. Though they are not what people normally think about when it comes to the school's history, sites like power plants and the underground tunnels are equally essential to the operation of the school.
I contacted the Director of Facilities, Ms. Mullin, to schedule a tour beforehand. In addition to Ms. Mullin, I was joined by Mr. Lyons, who is the advisor of the club, and Mr. Capenito, who works in the facilities. For a plumber like Mr. Capenito, his working hours span from 6 AM to 2 PM in the afternoon. All workers are on a rotating on-call schedule to address emergencies. Custodians have extra hours: in addition to the standard 6-2 schedule is the night shift.
Across the School Street is the facility house: Mauro’s grounds building, named after the Mauros. Mauro is a familiar name to many St. Markers because we all go to Mauro’s Village Cafe. The Mauro family is a prominent local family in Southborough and served in the town for over a hundred years. For instance, two Mauros were the chiefs of the Southborough fire department.
The first stop was the sewage treatment. Surprisingly, the smell was not as bad as I thought. This is because the school partners with an outside company that uses micro-bacteria to process solids. According to Ms. Mullin and Mr. Capenito, St. Mark’s gets its water from the Southborough water, which pulls from the Quabbin reservoir. Within the school are multiple water filters.
According to Mr. Carpenito, the school gets its power from the National Grid. However, because the school owns the solar farm, which collects electricity for the NSTAR (a utility company in Massachusetts), the school also gets a discount from the National Grid.
The heating system mostly relies on manual management. Certain areas in the school, such as the STEM building, the Putnam Family Arts Center, and the new building have their own Building and Management system (B&M), which is monitored on the computers. In contrast, the main building is much more challenging to manage because it is too old to get updated with a new heating system. For those of us who live in the building all yearlong, the white pipes overhanging the hallways in the main building are fiberglass, which is used to improve insulation in the building. Mr. Capenito had visited other boarding schools in the region, such as Deerfield and Groton. He claims that these schools have similar gas and oil systems as us, but some are a little more updated.
Most St. Markers find the fire alarm a nuisance. Mr. Capenito elaborates that most of these fire alarms are called trouble alarms (instead of emergency alarms), which are often triggered by faulty sensors. Thankfully, the fire alarms are sub-panel installations. This means that, for example, if an alarm was triggered in the Theriot House, it would only ring in T-house and the alarm would not reach the rest of the school.
After visiting the sewage treatments, we walked across the street to the power plants house, lying adjacent to the Health Services cottage. In 2007, St. Mark's updated its power plants to meet Massachusetts' environmental laws and make them more efficient. The power is converted either to run on oil or natural gas — for the past six years, the school primarily ran on gas because the price of gas was lower than that of oil. Mr. Capenito is proud that the school is aware of its carbon footprint in aligning with state’s requirements in order to limit pollution and toxins to be released into the air.
Coming back to the issue of insulation and heating in the main building, Mr. Capenito pointed out that the insulation is very outdated. Hot water circulation, for example, is a perennial problem for those residing in Main. Because the building is old and its pipings are not equipped to meet the high demand of the building to run, it is hard to satisfy all the occupants in the building efficiently. Therefore, Mr. Capenito and his colleagues proposed adding circulation pumps throughout the building. Another strategy he uses to improve circulation is to give the shower heads lower flows: the standard water flow is 3.5 gallons per minute, whereas the shower flow in Main is 1.25 gallons per minute.
In the past, when the school boilers ran on burning coal, an alternative to detention or other punishments was picking out slates. This means that students had to pick out piles of coal pieces because the coals did not burn sometimes. It was a long tradition— it was abolished in the early 2000s. Some older faculty like Mr. Warren certainly knows. Though St. Mark’s stopped using coal way before the 2000s, St. Mark’s had kept the term as a way to describe punishment for students. He added that “this was a very tedious and dirty job!” The labor could also be sharp and dangerous.
After a walkthrough of the power plants, a covert path brought us to the underground tunnels. Holdovers filmed many scenes in the tunnel - where the kids fought and chased each other around in the school basement.
In my follow-up conversation with Mr. Capenito, he recalled that when he worked on the attic above Gaccon one day, he found an old newspaper from around 1912 that reported the sinking of the Titanic. He found it on the wall with stuffed newspapers, which were used for insulation. Another time, Mr. Capenito found a vintage coke can while he was in the basement of the main building. He disclosed that the black box theater used to be a Fives (a sport similar to handball) Court. St. Mark’s had one of the five Fives courts in the country until 2001. Groton and St. Mark’s used to hold annual Fives competitions. Personally, I think these findings are not coincidental. The testaments of time and history, along these lines, show that St. Mark’s is still a quintessential boarding school.
As a maintenance worker, his favorite part of his job was these unintentional discoveries of the school history. In his own words, “to think there were students in the same hallways in 1865 that students are walking today in 2024 is amazing!”