FRAIMINGHAM, Mass. & INDIANAPOLIS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Apr 22, 2025--
Ameresco, Inc., (NYSE: AMRC), a leading energy solutions provider dedicated to helping customers navigate the energy transition, and Matchbook Learning Schools of Indiana, Inc. hosted a ribbon-cutting ceremony for The Match High School and Career Center on Thursday, April 3, 2025. The ceremony celebrated a key milestone in the more than $20M project.
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Following a competitive RFP process, Matchbook Learning selected Ameresco to lead all aspects of design, engineering, and construction for the project. The school’s campus includes two repurposed industrial warehouse buildings: the main school at 1401 Indiana Avenue and the career center at 1141 W 16th Street. DKGR Architects, an Indianapolis-based architecture firm, was selected by Ameresco as the project’s design partner.
To ensure the school could welcome its first class of over 50 students for the 2024 academic year, Ameresco expedited construction of the career center, completing that building in summer 2024. Construction of the main school was completed in March 2025, allowing students to transition to the new space for the remainder of the year.
“Ameresco and DKGR have helped us create something truly special: a space that reflects the promise and potential of every student we serve and one that inspires our students to learn and realize their career dreams,” said Sajan George, Founder, Matchbook Learning Schools of Indiana, Inc. “This belief was evident to everyone at the ribbon-cutting ceremony. An inspiring event and beautiful space.”
“We’ve worked to develop a space where students can really envision all of the future paths laid out in front of them,” said James Hill, Principal, Matchbook Learning. “It is incredibly gratifying to work with partners who not only helped us achieve that space but also drove that vision far past what we could have initially hoped.”
Among the energy efficiency improvements already installed over the last year are advanced building automation controls, building envelope improvements, insulated thermoplastic polyolefin (TPO) roofs, interior and exterior LED lighting upgrades, heat pump hot water heaters and HVAC upgrades. These upgrades will ensure the buildings are resource efficient, leading to long-term cost savings. Additionally, the school’s new 165KW photovoltaic (PV) solar and battery energy storage system (BESS), which will provide reliable, renewable backup energy to power the school’s operations, is slated to be installed later in 2025.
“We happy to have equipped The Match High School and Career Center with resilient systems and secure energy to support student learning for years to come,” said Lou Maltezos, President of Central & Western USA, Canada Regions at Ameresco. “Our work to support K-12 education initiatives like Matchbook helps support the next generation of energy innovators.”
The Match High School and Career Center is designed to support a comprehensive, technologically enhanced curriculum aligned with Matchbook’s mission to provide every student with a clear pathway to success. The career center will offer vocational and apprenticeship programs in construction trades, welding, engineering, and entrepreneurship. By integrating hands-on learning opportunities with advanced energy systems and infrastructure, the school aims to equip students with the tools and experience they need for sustainable careers.
To learn more about the energy efficiency solutions offered by Ameresco, visit www.ameresco.com/energy-efficiency/.
About Ameresco, Inc.
Founded in 2000, Ameresco, Inc. (NYSE: AMRC) is a leading energy solutions provider dedicated to helping customers reduce costs, enhance resilience, and decarbonize to net zero in the global energy transition. Our comprehensive portfolio includes implementing smart energy efficiency solutions, upgrading aging infrastructure, and developing, constructing, and operating distributed energy resources. As a trusted full-service partner, Ameresco shows the way by reducing energy use and delivering diversified generation solutions to Federal, state and local governments, utilities, educational and healthcare institutions, housing authorities, and commercial and industrial customers. Headquartered in Framingham, MA, Ameresco has more than 1,500 employees providing local expertise in North America and Europe. For more information, visit www.ameresco.com.
The announcement of completion of a customer’s project contract is not necessarily indicative of the timing or amount of revenue from such contract, of Ameresco’s overall revenue for any particular period or of trends in Ameresco’s overall total project backlog. This project was included in Ameresco’s previously reported contracted backlog as of December 31, 2024.
Ameresco and Matchbook Learning celebrated the grand opening on Thursday, April 3, 2025, highlighting the collaborative effort to enhance the future of education and career development.
THIMISTER-CLERMONT, Belgium (AP) — The memory of blood dripping from trucks loaded with the mangled bodies of U.S. soldiers arriving at a nearby war cemetery straight from the battlefield in 1945 still gives 91-year-old Marcel Schmetz nightmares.
It also instilled a lifelong sense of gratitude for the young soldiers from the United States and around the world who gave their lives battling the armies of Adolf Hitler to end World War II in Europe.
Schmetz even built a museum at his home in the Belgian Ardennes to honor their sacrifice.
“If the Americans hadn’t come, we wouldn’t be here,” the Belgian retiree said.
That same spirit also pervades Normandy in northern France, where the allied forces landed on June 6, 1944, a day that became the tipping point of the war.
In Normandy, Marie-Pascale Legrand is still taking care of the ailing Charles Shay, a 100-year-old American who stormed the bloodied beaches on that fateful D-Day as a teenager and fought to help liberate Europe for many more months.
“Gratitude for me means that I am eternally indebted, because I can live free today,” Legrand said.
After D-Day, it would take almost another year of fierce fighting before Germany would finally surrender on May 8, 1945. Commemorations and festivities are planned for the 80th anniversary across much of the continent for what has become known as Victory in Europe Day, or V-E Day, one of the most momentous days on the continent in recent centuries.
Ever since, for generation upon generation in the nations west of the Iron Curtain that sliced Europe in two, it became a day to confirm and reconfirm what were long seen as the unbreakable bonds with the United States as both stood united against Soviet Eastern Europe.
No more.
Over the past several months, the rhetoric from Washington has become increasingly feisty.
The Trump administration has questioned the vestiges of the decades-old alliance and slapped trade sanctions on the 27-nation European Union and the United Kingdom. Trump has insisted that the EU trade bloc was there to “screw” the United States from the start.
The wartime allies are now involved in a trade war.
“After all that has happened, it is bound to leave scars,” said Hendrik Vos, European studies professor at Ghent University.
Yet deep in the green hills and Ardennes woods where the Battle of the Bulge was fought and Schmetz lives, just as along the windswept bluffs of Legrand's Normandy, the ties endure — isolated from the tremors of geopolitics.
“For all those that criticize the Americans, we can only say that for us, they were all good,” Schmetz said. “We should never forget that.”
After watching the horrors of the dead soldiers at the nearby Henri-Chapelle cemetery as an 11-year-old, Schmetz vowed he would do something in their honor and gathered war memorabilia.
A car mechanic with a big warehouse, he immediately started to turn it into the Remember Museum 39-45 once he retired more than three decades ago.
“I had to do something for those who died,” he said.
And for the treasure trove of military artifacts, what truly stands out is a long bench in the kitchen where U.S. veterans, their children, and even their grandchildren come and sit and talk about what happened, and the bonds uniting continent, memories all meticulously kept by his wife Mathilde, to pass on to new visitors and new generations of schoolkids.
In the coming weeks, she will be going out to put 696 roses on the graves of soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division — nicknamed “The Big Red One,” or “BRO” — who lie buried among 7,987 headstones at Henri Chapelle.
Charles Shay, who is now bedridden in Normandy, was also part of the 1st Infantry Division and came through the Ardennes region too before heading to Germany. He survived the Korean War too and started making visits to the D-Day beaches around two decades ago. Over the years, he became increasingly sick and Legrand, who has helped veterans in one way or another for more than 40 years, took him in to her home in 2018.
He has been living there ever since.
The moment everything changed for Legrand was listening to then U.S. President Ronald Reagan in 1984 speaking on a Normandy bluff of the sacrifice and heroism of American soldiers.
Barely in her 20s, she realized that “their blood is in our soil and we have to show gratitude. We have to do something. I didn't know what at the time, but I knew I would do something to show it.”
She had long volunteered to help Allied veterans before she met Shay. He was lonely, sick and frail when she took him in and began caring for him at her Normandy home.
“It is a strong symbol, which takes on a new dimension in this day and age,” she said, referring to the tumultuous trans-Atlantic relations that have put the bonds between allies that Trump called “unbreakable” only six years ago, under extreme pressure.
Central in Trump's criticism of European NATO allies is that they have happily hunkered far too long under U.S. military supremacy since World War II and should start paying much more of their own way in the alliance. He has done so in such terms that many Europeans sincerely fear the breakup of the trans-Atlantic bonds that were a core of global politics for almost a century.
“The naive belief that the Americans will, by definition, always be an ally — once and for all, that is gone,” said Vos. It also raises a moral question for Europeans now.
“Are we doomed to be eternally grateful?” Vos asked.
FILE - Looking north from 44th Street, New York's Times Square is packed Monday, May 7, 1945, with crowds celebrating the news of Germany's unconditional surrender in World War II. (AP Photo/Tom Fitzsimmons, File)
World War II D-Day veteran and Penobscot Elder from Maine, Charles Norman Shay, center, and Marie Pacale Legrand during a D-Day 76th anniversary ceremony at the Normandy American Cemetery in Colleville-sur-Mer, Normandy, France, June 6, 2020. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
FILE - An American soldier, identified as Patsy Caliendo, is laid to rest in the largest Allied military cemetery on the Western Front March 14, 1945, in Henri-Chapelle, Belgium. (AP Photo/William C. Allen, File)
Director of the WWII Remember Museum 1939-1945, Marcel Schmetz, stands near vintage WWII vehicles inside his museum in Thimister-Clermont, Belgium, April 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
Gravestones of American WWII soldiers at the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery in Henri Chapelle, Belgium, April 22, 2025. (AP Photo/Virginia Mayo)
