The $30-million school on Providence Pike was constructed by Gilbane Building Co. and designed by Robinson Green Beretta Corp. The school was built on land that used to be the high school’s parking lots and basketball courts.

The Providence Journal / Bob Thayer

NORTH SMITHFIELD — The new middle school on Providence Pike has all the outward evidence of recent technological advances; each classroom has computer plug-ins arrayed along its walls, the bathroom faucets are controlled by the kind of sensors you see in airport restrooms.

But it was the work that went into the things behind the walls, above the ceiling tiles and underground that posed the greatest challenges in constructing the three-story, 105,000-square-foot building that will house grades six, seven and eight, officials said. It will open to students in late August.

School Committee member Paul Vadenais, the committee’s representative on the Town Council’s building committee for the project, said the surging cost of fuel oil — home heating oil hit $4.79 a gallon this month — is vindicating the building committee’s decision to install energy-efficient heating and ventilation systems in the new $30-million school, which was built by Gilbane Building Co. and designed by Robinson Green Beretta Corp.

Boilers that in the older schools would take up an entire room have been replaced with two that are not much larger than double-door refrigerators. They feed hot water into a system that can monitor the temperature of each room and automatically change conditions room by room. Each room has its own heat and ventilator pumps that can adjust temperature and air quality by individual room.

Vadenais said the system can be programmed to anticipate needs. It can automatically begin heating up the building at, say, 6 a.m. so that it will be warm when students begin arriving. And then it can automatically start to shut down at a preset time, without constant monitoring by staff.

Vadenais and School Committee Chairman Robert Lafleur both said the Town Council-appointed building committee was a good strategy. Lafleur said by having a panel picked by the Town Council, the project didn’t become a political issue between the council and the School Committee.

Vadenais said the members of the building committee were strategically selected. There was an accountant, a specialist in heating and ventilation systems, and a contractor among the group

Charles Roberts, project manager for Gilbane Building Co., said the middle school’s location created utility problems for the project. No water or sewer lines are near the property, meaning the new school needed its own well and sewage-treatment system. The building committee had also required that the building, its parking lots and new tennis courts discharge no storm water.

A 450-deep well had to be drilled for water supply, and filtration equipment was installed on-site, to treat all wastewater from the school before discharging it into a leeching field underground. The storm water is piped off the hard surfaces into a network of underground pipes that can hold as much as 580,000 gallons of water while letting it gradually seep into the surrounding soil.

Pretty much all the underlying land around the school, beneath the soccer, baseball and football fields, has been put to some kind of leeching use.

The school was built on land that used to be the high school’s parking lots and outdoor basketball courts. There is one restoration job left for the contractors, Roberts said: reinstalling some of the “holes” in a flying disc golf course set up in 2005 as an Eagle Scout project by then-high school student Billy Hargreaves.

The course involved a series of metal baskets mounted on poles that players throw the discs into in the least number of throws. Roberts said one day he saw what he thought were trespassers on the property, but it was a couple of disc golfers come to play the local course.

“They were from Hawaii,” Roberts said. “They said they’d come to Rhode Island to get extra points, You apparently get points for playing different courses. They said ‘Please let us play so we can get our points.’ ”

jhill@projo.com