By RUSS OLIVO

WOONSOCKET — Reinaldo Johnson sometimes has to fight so much traffic in the overcrowded halls of Woonscket Middle School he's late for class, but a sneak peek of the new school he'll be attending in January gave him cause for hope.

“I like it a lot,” said Johnson, a sixth-grader. “Everything looks like it's going to run smoothly. Everything looks like it's going to be spread out more instead of being squished into a little corner.”
Johnson, 11, and about a dozen of his classmates were the first members of the general public to get an inside glimpse of the new $80 million, twin middle school project as the Building Committee opened the facility for an invitation-only tour on Monday.
What they found was a school starkly different from the tired, dysfunctional building in which they now attend classes – bright, airy and spacious, with a distinct whiff of the architectural equivalent of new-car smell.
After the tour, they tossed a football around the vast expanse of grass – two soccer fields, actually – sandwiched between the Hamlet Avenue schools, a preview of coming days when it will be possible to hold physical education classes in the fresh air, says Principal Patrick McGee.
“Our kids will be able to spend time outdoors on a green campus with grass and trees,” he said. “The buildings are state-of-the-art in terms of layout and technology. This is just an amazing opportunity that doesn't come around very often.”
The students toured Woonsocket Middle School at Hamlet, the mirror image of the Woonsocket Middle School at Villanova, as the two facilities are called. The two-story, brick-and-masonry buildings are designed to house a combined 1,760 students, somewhat more than the population of the existing middle school, parts of which are more than a century old. Students and teachers have long complained that the building is undersized, poorly lit and plagued by a maze-like floor plan that makes it difficult to navigate.
Each of the new buildings consists of about 128,000 square feet of space, with 45 regular classrooms and science labs, plus an art room, a consumer science lab, a library, gymnasium and cafetorium – a sort of dining hall-auditorium combo, replete with a sparkling new kitchen. The buildings, designed by the architectural firm Ai3 and built by the  Gilbane Company as general contractor, have been finished slightly ahead of schedule and under budget, said Planning Director Joel Mathews, chairman of the building committee.
The buildings were inspired by Lincoln Middle School – also built by Gilbane –  but officials said thin budgets forced the city to make some belt-tightening changes in design, structural materials and various frills. For example, Mathews said the building committee had to foresake a self-contained auditorium and use less interior brick to save money. Many of the corridors are lined with a masonry product known as “ground block,” a cinderblock-shaped stone with a more upscale, textured look to it.
Although visitors will be impressed by the lavish oak counters in the administrative offices, and the handsome oak trophy cabinets that punctuate the halls, City Councilman John Ward, also a member of the building committee, said there is less solid wood detailing in the project than Lincoln Middle School.
But nobody is complaining. Praising the leadership team at Gilbane, Mathews said that despite the obstacles, the city is poised to open two buildings that will give students a fresh  lease on their educational lives.
“The middle school kids will go from a dungeon to a building that's light, airy and has all the technological improvements that will be very conducive to a good education,” said Mathews. “Working with a modest budget, the architects designed a great product.”
Ward said the modern educational complex will also go a long way toward sprucing up the Hamlet Avenue gateway to the city, adding, “It gives the city a good image.”
Jonathan Gallishaw, the School Department's technical director, said about a third of all the classrooms are equipped with “smart boards,” a type of computerized whiteboard considered a state-of-the-art teaching tool. And all the other classrooms are already hardwired to rig up smart boards in the future, a move that will make it easier to obtain more of them later.
“Because the classrooms are prepped for them makes it easier to get grants,” Gallishaw said. “That was one thing I requested of Gilbane, so we'd never have to break a wall.”
Although the glistening expanse of never-been-scuffed hardwoods in the gymnasium was something few people may ever see again, it was the library that seemed to impress some of the student visitors most. No yet filled with books, the spacious room was equipped with new oak furniture and featured an administrative office designed to look like a fairy tale cottage.
Abraham Gomez, 11, said the whole school seemed more spacious, modern and easier to get around in than Woonsocket Middle School. Gomez, a sixth-grader who just arrived at WMS in September, says his school is “old and the bathrooms are pretty bad.” Not everything works the way it's supposed to, and sometimes “the pipes make some weird noises.”
But Gomez, taking in the library, said he already has a positive feeling about attending the new facility, where the middle school population is due to arrive Jan. 4 – after the holiday break.
“My expectations are really high,” he said. “I'm going to have a good time coming here.”
Though the buildings are essentially complete, the city has not begun paying for them in earnest yet. Sometime in November, the city will float $74 million in bonds to pay for the schools, located on a onetime mill site of 20 acres, north of Morton Street. Gilbane spent about two months before construction began demolishing old factories and cleaning up pollution on the site, one of the most challenging parts of the project, according to Project Manager Joanna Kripp.
Under a pact with the Rhode Island Department of Education, the city is responsible for only about 19 percent of the tab, or about $1.2 million per year for the next 25 years, beginning next July,  according to Mathews. Though the city originally sought authority to float $80 million in bonds, the sum was capped by state legislators who lambasted the financing package as a sweetheart deal for the city, which ultimately raised the shortfall from grants and other sources.