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Date: 3/22/2021
HOLYOKE – The Holyoke City Council and School Committee hosted a joint meeting on the evening of March 17 where the construction of a new middle school in the city was discussed.
Among those in attendance were Mayor Alex Morse, state Rep. Patricia Duffy, and Sen. John Velis. The committee began the meeting first with a presentation and discussion on the building of a new middle school in the city. The vote for a debt exclusion override for two new middle schools was defeated by Holyoke voters in the November 2019 election.
Morse explained that since then a team of city leaders and officials had been meeting and working with the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) to find a path forward to “build at least one new middle school.” Interim Superintendent for the Holyoke Public Schools and the district’s Chief Finance and Operations Officer, Anthony Soto, said when the vote was defeated the team took that not as the city didn’t want new middle schools, just that residents disagreed on how they should be funded. Following the vote, he said a meeting with the MSBA took place in the fall of 2020 and they said they would support the building of one new middle school for 550 students, but they wanted to see the path to funding.
Soto said Morse, working with others, was able to prove to the MSBA that the city would be able to afford a new school without increasing their debt. “So I think this was an important step in giving the MSBA a level of comfort that Holyoke is serious about this,” he said.
Soto said the earliest a new school could open would be 2025 and if the city were to build a new school in 2024 at a 4.5 percent interest rate via a 30-year bond they would be able to maintain the “same level of debt [$4.8 million].”
He explained that when receivership took place “there was a desire to move forward with distinct elementary, middle and high schools.” Soto said as new middle schools were discussed, this once again came up in discussion, and the district had began to “undo the K to eight model and move in that direction.” The process for this began in the fall of 2018 with the opening of two new middle schools, Holyoke STEM and Veritas Prep. This allowed for the Morgan Elementary School and E.N. White School to be converted to an elementary school and for Kelly Elementary School to be partially converted to an elementary school.
In the fall of 2020, the district began to convert Donahue to an elementary school, but leaves the Joseph Metcalf School as a middle school. Moving forward in the fall of 2021, the Kelly Elementary School will be fully converted to an elementary school and Veritas will have grades five to eight. In the fall of 2022, Maurice A. Donahue School will be a fully converted elementary school, however sixth graders at the E.N. White school will still need a middle school location.
Soto said right now students were “lacking the middle school experience” that would prepare them for high school. He added that it was also challenging for educators and left the students “not getting the experience they deserve.”
He said that they’d had a meeting with a MSBA official the morning of the meeting and after thinking they were going to take up the vote in June, the MSBA could take the vote on the project as early as April 14. With the financing documents that the city provided to the MSBA, the association also was requesting a resolution from the City Council expressing their support and confirmation from the inspector general’s office to ensure that the architects and OPM services would be kept on as they’d done a significant amount of work for the first projects when they were proposed.
Should the district be invited into the process by April, a feasibility study would be conducted between July and December, and a design would be put together between January and June of 2022. The project funding agreement would then be put together, dependent on bonding and then the design and bidding would take place during the fall of 2022 and spring of 2023. Construction would then take 21 months leading to the school opening in fall of 2025. Should the project be approved by June, it would lead to a slightly longer timeline with a spring 2026 opening.
City Councilor Terry Murphy expressed concerns about whether the timeline in order to be approved by April 6 would be difficult to meet so quickly. Additionally, he said he hoped that within five to 10 years they’d be able to build a second school. City Council President Todd McGee said he felt as though they should put the resolution together and before the council as soon as possible, and then proceed from there. The committee then voted unanimously to send the resolution to the city council.
However, McGivern said if they wanted the City Council to have a unanimous vote in favor of the resolution on April 6, he felt that the wording of the resolution needed to lean away from committing to the financial aspect of the project. However, Murphy said the MSBA wanted the City Council “to recognize we can do this financially.” Morse said he felt that the overall general support from the council without a financial obligation would be “sufficient” as the MSBA had all the financial documentation and information that they needed so far.
Councilor Juan Anderson-Burgos said he felt as though it was important for all City Councilors to be a part of the conversation surrounding the project. After a significant amount of discussion surrounding the language in the resolution, the committees voted in favor of amending the language surrounding the resolution, which would be sent to the City Council. The City Council will now vote on the resolution at their April 6 meeting.
Soto then went on to discuss students’ academic needs due to the pandemic. He said that the school had missed academic markers due to the pandemic, but they don’t plan to retain students as a result because “the pandemic wasn’t their fault.” However, if a parent was to ask for their student to be retained, the district would consider it. Additionally, he said the district would “take a multi-year approach” to recovering from the pandemic and get students back up to academic standards. Soto said that the district did experience a drop in enrollment in early grades such as pre-K, which was common across the Commonwealth.
City Council member Gladys Lebron-Martinez questioned what was happening with MCAS with regard to graduating seniors. Valerie Annear, chief of instruction for the district, said the state had changed the regulations so that this year’s sitting seniors did not have to take MCAS to graduate and “had an alternative pathway,” however, juniors would need to take MCAS this year at some point in the spring.