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Selectmen reject middle school SOIs

Date: 4/9/2015

LONGMEADOW – Longmeadow Superintendent of Schools Marie Doyle said she was “disappointed” by the Select Board’s April 6 decision not to support a pair of proposed statements of interest (SOI) to be submitted to the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) for a new middle school.

The board shot down both proposals, which were unanimously supported by the School Committee on March 6, by a vote of 4 to 1.

“I think we are disappointed because we were looking forward to the opportunity to have a conversation with the community [about the district’s middle schools],” Doyle said. “We were also looking forward to having an in-depth study on what needs to be done on these buildings and to have experts give us our opinion.

“It was an opportunity to have the state reimburse us for these studies, but now we’ll move forward and do the best we can with what limited resources we have,” she continued.

Doyle said the MSBA typically reimburses districts for at least 50 percent of a school building project. The SOI is reviewed by the MSBA and districts with the most need are entered into its programs. If a district is accepted one of the first steps is to complete a comprehensive feasibility study of targeted buildings.

Last year, eight out of 106 districts in the Commonwealth were accepted into an MSBA program, she noted.

The district’s plans now include creating a “visioning group” to determine what the community thinks about the middle schools, Doyle said.

“We’ll also have to reexamine capital planning; what are priorities are and what needs to be done immediately as we’ve been holding off on many of our [repair] requests in hopes that this feasibility study would go through.”

School Committee Vice Chair Michael Clark said major repair projects still need to be completed at district schools and “it’s not saving the town money” even though a new middle school would not be proposed at this time.  

“Now we’re going to have to just go holistically through the buildings and talk about the ways that we can improve them for students,” he added.

Select Board Chair Richard Foster said he opposed the SOI at this time because there are competing needs such as building a new Department of Public Works (DPW) facility and Adult Center.

“Right now, we spend about 70 cents for every dollar we spend in this town on education,” he added. “Right now, 97 percent of the debt that our community has is school debt.”

Foster said the town has to form a long-term capital project plan before it could consider constructing a new middle school.

“I do object to the fact that a simple ‘Yes’ [or] ‘No’ vote seems to indicate our preference one way or the other,” he added.

He also noted that if a new middle school were constructed now, in about 50 years both that building and the recently constructed Longmeadow High School (LHS) would need to be replaced around the same time.

Select Board Vice Chair Paul Santaniello, who voted in favor of the SOIs, said the proposed middle school, DPW facility, and Adult Center have “nothing to do” with the levy limit.

“It’ll effect your property taxes, but it has nothing to do with the levy limit, which is our ability to tax people for the operational ability for the town of Longmeadow,” he added.

Selectman Marie Angelides said the LHS project needs to be closed out before the town can think about building a new middle school.

“I think we need to do some really serious fiscal planning,” she added. “I’m talking long range. Where’s our tax rate going? How are we going to afford and pay for these things? I don’t think we complete one, finish DPW before we start the middle school, I don’t believe that. I think we need to look at the table and say for the next five to 10 years, ‘What’s going to go on when?’”