Franklin High School gets funding to renovate entrance, classroom doors through grant

Classrooms with tarnished wooden doors, aging bathroom stalls and an entrance that’s been blocked off since 2011.

As Dan LeGallo led a tour of Franklin High School, pointing out areas of the building in desperate need of transformation, the school day progressed around him as it would normally.

Teachers greeted students in the hallways with compliments, jokes and fist-bumps as they rushed between classes. An unfamiliar face shook students’ hands, too: Sen. Jeanne Shaheen, who visited to celebrate securing a $461,000 federal grant that will enable a series of repairs at school.

Administrators plan to install a secure double entrance with a camera, so staff can let people in with the press of a button. LeGallo, superintendent of Franklin schools, envisions the school’s blue-and-gold gymnasium functioning as a “hub, not only for the school, but for the community.”

They expect this congressional funding to be a lifeline for the school’s infrastructure.

“All students are important,” City Councilor Ed Prive told Shaheen on their tour of the school. “Every single child that walks through any of these schools in Franklin requires to have the best handed to them. But we need funding.”

The main entrance’s stairs lead directly to the high school’s gymnasium, which underwent its own renovation in 2024. Pat Connaughton — an NBA shooting guard for the Charlotte Hornets and an Arlington, Mass., native — supported the renovation by securing a $117,000 grant and raising another $53,000 through community fundraising.

The high school gym at saw its last sports games in 1995, the year school board member Adam Heath graduated from Franklin High School.

Heath lamented that, with Soldier’s Memorial Hall still mostly closed, there hasn’t been one place where people could gather. He hopes the newly renovated gym, with a reopened, secure external entrance, will be that place.

“We really don’t have a hub for meetings or functions or fairs or anything that the community would like to do. We don’t really have that option,” Heath said. “Anything you could think of that bigger schools might do in their gyms, we couldn’t necessarily [do] … but that also can be done now at the high school, because this looks so much better.”

Another part of the grant will fund renovations to the women’s bathroom right next to the gym. The five-stall restroom will be expanded into an all-gender restroom, so it can be easily accessed during events at the high school.

The leftover grant money will go toward replacing as many classroom and office doors as possible. The doors were installed in the 1960s and LeGallo said, while they are safe, they have significantly aged and some of them don’t even have windows.

“We’re excited about the opportunity to update those doors throughout the building as much as we can,” LeGallo said.

Franklin recently applied for another federal grant with help from Shaheen and Rep. Maggie Goodlander’s offices to support renovations to 10 classrooms that will be used to prepare students for the workforce.

In a roundtable discussion in the school’s Maker Space, which also opened this school year, Shaheen was met with tough questions about special education funding. Nearly 35% of students in the Franklin School District have a disability, the fourth-highest disability rate in the state, according to 2024 data from the Department of Education.

Shaheen said funding from the federal government under the Trump administration has been difficult to obtain. The federal government has cut off grants for nearly every program, and while special education funding increased slightly this year, it was not enough “to really help the students who need it,” she said.

The senator, who has been working with Franklin for several years, said she’s eager to see the recently-secured federal dollars put to use at the school.

“Investing in this generation is so critical to everything else that happens next, and we’ve got to remind people about how important it is,” she said. “I’ve seen the investments over the years and the commitment that the community and faculty have to the school, and it’s exciting to see the changes and the investments that are being made.”

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