By Alice Waugh
Minuteman High School has given up its attempts to modify the regional agreement among its 16 members towns and is putting a full-court press on getting approvals by next June from those towns to pay for a new school building.
In August, the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) approved state funding and a go-head for the design phase for a new $144.9 million Minuteman High School for 628 students. It would be built on district land in Lincoln adjacent to the existing school, which sits on property straddling Lincoln and Lexington. The MSBA would pay for at least 40 percent of the cost, with the rest coming from member towns.
Minuteman now has until June 30, 2016 to secure local funding for the project. Under terms of the regional agreement, voters in all 16 member towns will have to approve their share of the total cost at Town Meeting for the project to go forward. This will be challenging, since several towns disagree with the proposed size of the new building, and another town, Wayland, is seeking to secede from the Minuteman district altogether.
One of the major issues is the new school’s projected enrollment, which continues to include a substantial percentage of out-of-district students. Non-district towns pay tuition for their students but not a share of capital costs. Some town argued for a smaller, less expensive school with fewer out-of-district students, but the MSBA has said it will not fund a school designed for less than 600 students.
Bypassing Town Meetings?
There’s another route to approval, however. As an alternative to Town Meeting approvals from every town, state law allows the district’s school committee (by a two-thirds vote) to call for a district-wide ballot measure.
“It’s been done several times in other parts of the state,” said Minuteman Superintendent-Director Edward Bouquillon.
Perhaps in anticipation of this possibility, Minuteman commissioned a poll of district voters to assess their support for the school. Of the 400 voters polled by DAPA Research Inc. in late August, 68.5% indicated they would vote to build a new school, 23% were undecided and 8.5% indicated they would oppose it. By a margin of 46% to 39%, those polled said they would prefer to see a decision about the project made by voters during a district-wide ballot instead of by individual Town Meetings.
“There’s a clear willingness to build a new school,” said pollster David Paleologos, head of DAPA Research, in a press release about the poll. “And this support crosses all demographics: gender, income, age, area, and even political party. These are overwhelming numbers, and the type of results we don’t see very often.”
“I was surprised and I even would use the word shocked at the level of support we had in the communities,” Bouquillon said.
The Minuteman School Committee has yet to formally decide on how it will try to win local funding approvals, he said. One possibility is trying to go through Town Meetings as before, and then if one of the towns votes no, opting for the district-wide ballot.
Minuteman’s cost estimates show that Lincoln’s share of the debt for the new school will be about $18.49 a year in property taxes for a median-value Lincoln home, or $2.16 per $100,000 of property value.
The Lincoln Council on Aging will get an update on the project on Tuesday, Nov. 3, when the Minuteman School Building Committee will make a presentation at 2:30 p.m. in Bemis Hall.
No agreement on agreement
Over the summer, officials from Belmont, Arlington and Sudbury wrote the MSBA to voice their opposition to the possibility of a district-wide ballot initiative. They and other towns were also against modifying the regional agreement earlier, fearing that it would have decreased their voting power and/or increase their share of costs for Minuteman.
Only 10 of the 16 towns adopted the new agreement, which called for what Bouquillon called “common sense corrections” in a memo. It would have changed how towns vote on items relating to Minuteman, including a switch to weighted voting for some issues, as well as the formula that determines each member town’s capital assessment. He summarized the proposal in this March 26, 2014 letter to the editor.
“We had operated in accord with the concerns of the individual member towns that they were saying, ‘In order for us to approve a new school building, we need a new regional agreement.’ That was a preference… but the reasons they wanted a new agreement were different for every town,” said Bouquillon.
“In good faith, I tried to address the concerns of each of the 16 towns, but not having worked for the United Nations recently, I was not able to accomplish that,” he added. “I spent five years on it and I was not successful, so as they [the Minuteman School Committee] voted, it’s completely off my plate.”
That 8-4 School Committee vote that directed Bouquillon to end his efforts at winning approval to amend the agreement took place on July 7.
However, the out-of-district enrollment and tuition issue has already been addressed separately by the state. In February, the Board of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE) revised its regulations to include a provision allowing a capital fee be added to the base tuition rate set by DESE.
“Putting it bluntly, non-member communities no longer get a ‘free ride’ when it comes to capital expenditures,” Bouquillon said in an August 28 letter to the district’s Boards of Selectmen.
Recruitment will be key
In that letter, Bouquillon also noted that the district planned to more effectively recruit students from district towns. “We conservatively project that more than 500 of the 628 students will be from within the district within a few years of the project’s completion,” he wrote.
As of October 2014, Minuteman had 673 full-time students, according to its fiscal 2016 proposed budget. Of the total enrollment of 745, which also included part-time and post-graduate students, 45 percent were from out of district. Arlington had the lion’s share of students with 152, more than three times the number from the second-place town of Lexington. Lincoln sent six of the 745 students.
The new school will be smaller than the current school but will include two Career Academies and offer new programming, including advanced manufacturing and fabrication and multimedia design and engineering. It will also substantially improve lab space for robotics, engineering and automation; environmental science and technology; culinary arts and hospitality; and health assisting. It will also continue to offer AP classes, foreign languages, music, art, and an array of college prep classes.
If district voters don’t approve local funding one way or another by the June deadline, “that would be—I don’t think devastating is too strong a word. The financial model for that is simply unsustainable,” Bouquillon said. The district would lose the promised state funding and be faced with substantially renovating the aging building on its own. Building code issues are serious enough that the school could face loss of state accreditation at some point if nothing is done.
“People are starting to see the logic of moving forward with this project now with a smaller, more efficient school with lower operating costs,” he said.
