By Philip Sean Curran
SANDY HOOK – Two buildings that are more than 100 years old at Fort Hancock will be turned into classrooms, storage and other space for high school students studying marine sciences, technology and engineering at the former Army installation.
The $14 million plan to restore the buildings will expand the campus of the Marine Academy of Science and Technology (MAST), a career academy in the Monmouth County Vocational School District. The taxpayer-funded project, scheduled to start this fall, fits into broader plans the National Park Service has for those and other federally-owned buildings to be renovated and adaptively reused.
MAST is home to 277 students who also are cadets in the Navy Junior Reserve Officers’ Training Corps. Students wear military uniforms to school twice a week. Their classes are held inside former Army buildings, like the ones that are going to be renovated.
Building 23, dating to the 1890s, is one of 32 original structures built at the fort. Once a barracks for enlisted men, the 10,980-square-foot building will have four classrooms, showers and lockers on the first floor and a drill hall that will double as an event space on the second, principal Earl Moore said. Once it is fixed up, students on the school’s competitive drill team will have an indoor space to practice as opposed to practicing outside.
Building 56, a former mess hall built in 1905 and measuring 3,300 square feet, will be turned into a storage facility and place where students are issued their uniforms and other equipment. The project has to meet historic preservation standards set by the federal government.
“We’ve got a team of multiple agencies involved in this, in the design, the restoration, the architectural, the structural” facets of the project, Moore said of a plan that was conceived in 2014.
“This is exciting on so many levels, because it’s preserving historic buildings,” said Tracie Smith-Yeoman, the senior naval science instructor in the NJROTC program at MAST. “It’s satisfying some needs that we have right at this very moment. And then it’s opening the door to possibilities of expanding the program in the future.”
The Park Service owns the buildings and the land at the fort, decommissioned in 1974. The federal agency has an open request for potential tenants willing to renovate and occupy old buildings at the fort, through up to 60-year leases.
“We don’t have enough money to care for them ourselves, but we want to preserve them,” said Park Service spokeswoman Daphne Yun. “And so this is a relatively unique way of preserving them, leasing them out and then people would rehabilitate them.”
As part of the program, the federal government will give developers credit toward their lease for how much they make in capital renovations. At the moment, 16 buildings are available.
“I’m excited for MAST, but I’m also excited for Fort Hancock,” said Lillian G. Burry, Monmouth County freeholder.
Burry also sits on the Fort Hancock 21st Century Advisory Committee, a board that advises the federal government on how to redevelop the area.
“We’re trying really hard to make those buildings available to the public,” she said. “So I think if people see that kind of progress being made, it’s an encouragement.”
The MAST project involved county, state and federal government. The renovation plan was included in an $18 million bond ordinance for improvements at the county vocational schools approved by the freeholders March 28.
But one wrinkle is that two federally protected ospreys have made a nest in building 23 and no construction can happen within 200 feet of an active nest, per federal regulations. The school and the Park Service were scheduled to meet this week to discuss the issue, to determine what work could be done, Moore said.
MAST has been at Fort Hancock since the school was started in 1981.
“So we have developed a really good relationship with (the) National Park Service over the years,” Moore said. “They have cooperated with us in terms of bringing these buildings back. Our plans for this part of the campus and for the two new buildings adjacent and expanding our campus have all been in cooperation with them.”
“We’re very excited about it,” Yun said of the MAST project.
Surrounded by water, MAST is located next door to a lab run by the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, where students can work with federal scientists.
“So one of the key things about where you put a vocational school, especially a career academy-style vocational school, you have to have it in close proximity to … the theme you’re delivering,” Moore said. “The school’s been here since 1981. It has gone through many, many changes, from a traditional vocational program to one of the elite career academies in the country today.”
