When Article 23 comes up at Town Meeting, voters will probably ask some tough questions that its proponents won’t be able to answer. Article 23 requests $500,000 for a feasibility and design study to solve, once and for all, the mold problems in the elementary school kindergarten wing and also to bring the rest of the building up to current standards. But until the study proceeds, many questions about the project’s scope and budget are unanswerable.
This conundrum was the heart of discussion at a March 10 meeting of the Hildreth Elementary School Building Committee, about a dozen school officials and resident volunteers who will shepherd the project from beginning to end.
Committee member Ron Ostberg said voters at Town Meeting would likely want to know about the project’s budget “in excruciating detail” before supporting the article.
But Town Administrator Tim Bragan countered, “You don’t know the scope of the project yet.”
And committee member Rick Maiore, who also serves on the committee overseeing the Town Hall project, said, “We’ll have to explain to Town Meeting that we have a partner here, a banker—the Massachusetts School Building Authority—who owns 45 percent of the project. And we’ll need to explain that this is a positive thing.”
Maiore was referring to the fact that the elementary school project won a highly competitive grant from the state authority. The MSBA will reimburse 45 percent of the costs of the study and also a similar share of later construction costs if the town goes ahead with the plan.
As part of the conditions for the grant, the MSBA provides the architectural and design team that will work with the local building committee to plan and carry out the project. A second local group that also has input is the visioning committee, whose task is to “formulate the educational program” for the renovated building, according to School Superintendent Linda Dwight.
If approved at Town Meeting next week, the feasibility and design study will be completed in 2017, Dwight said. The study will present Harvard with several options at different cost levels for updating the elementary school. The final proposal would be complete with construction plans and cost estimates.
At that point, the project will come back to the 2018 Annual Town Meeting for a vote on moving forward with construction. And voters at that Town Meeting will again have the opportunity to voice their questions, with many more answers available.
