DeFazio Park remains in play as a possible site for a new middle school despite multiple calls for taking it off the table during a novel and perhaps unprecedented joint “board summit” of seven town committees held Sept. 25 at Broadmeadow School.
The Select Board, School Committee and Park and Recreation Commission all recommended that DeFazio be removed from consideration during the three-hour meeting, which also included the Finance Committee, Planning Board, Conservation Commission and the Pollard School Building Committee.
These are the seven boards that Town Manager Katie King said, “will have a vote at some point in the process that either will materially shape the Pollard project or will determine its viability.”
“This is like a master class in decentralized government,” King said at the outset of the meeting, which was intended to get all the municipal stakeholders in the same room to discuss the next iteration of Pollard via what would be the most expensive building project in town history.
School Superintendent Dan Gutekanst said one reason the summit was necessary is because more focus so far has been on fields and construction logistics rather than the school itself.
“As I’ve listened to conversations and watched board meetings, it’s become clear that too much of the focus in my view has been on how many fields are being used and how many trucks can get in the laydown yard. There has not been as much on what kind of school we need.”
Proponents for eliminating DeFazio as a building site said doing so would allow the project to sharpen its focus, move at a faster pace and not incur the additional costs that time adds to public projects. They argued that the scale of the DeFazio site’s challenges is sufficiently well known and no additional review is required. That time would be better spent examining the options available at the current Pollard site, which is also not without its challenges.
Supporters of keeping DeFazio in the mix argued that there has not been sufficient due diligence done to support such a major decision and questioned whether there was true urgency to act.
The key audience for the meeting was the Pollard School Building Committee, which is responsible for shepherding the Pollard project through the Massachusetts School Building Authority process. The town stands to be reimbursed by the MSBA for 20–25% of the more than $300 million estimated cost of the project but must follow the MSBA’s stringent guidelines -– one of which is for the town to establish a school building committee to manage the project.
The building committee is composed of all the members of the Public Permanent Building Committee plus two representatives of the school department. It has the authority to eliminate sites from consideration.
The building committee heard comments from members of the other six boards during the first two hours of the meeting before calling its own meeting to order.
After considerable discussion of the project and what members heard from the other boards, the building committee voted 6–1 in favor of a motion from Chair Richard Creem to not remove any options from consideration at this time.
Creem said that it was too early in the process and the decision was too consequential to be made without more due diligence. Creem acknowledged that there were benefits to keeping the project on its ambitious schedule, but that did not justify a rushed review.
He said the committee owed it to the town to be thorough. “I cannot square that commitment with removing any of the seven options until each of those options has been fully vetted,” he said.
A bullseye on DeFazio
The building committee has a goal to finalize its site selection by Dec. 18 so the project can be on the MSBA’s February meeting agenda for a vote approving that selection. If successful, this could put the town in position to hold a debt-exclusion override election in November 2026.
That would effectively create an August 2026 deadline to have a plan sufficiently evolved to put the override on the ballot and bring the project for a Town Meeting vote in Octobter 2026.
If the town misses that Dec. 18 deadline, the MSBA would not vote on site approval until April at the earliest. That would likely push back the required town override election to fund the project to the spring of 2027 and possibly beyond.
The implicit intent of the summit was to discuss removing the DeFazio site from consideration and free up the School Building Committee to do a more thorough vetting of the remaining options at the current Pollard site — either new construction or an “addition/renovation” of either a grade 6–8 or grade 7–8 school.
“The end game for the school building committee right now is to submit on Dec. 18 a preferred schematic report with one option to the MSBA,” School Superintendent Dan Gutekanst told the seven boards.
Matt LaRue from HMFH Architects, the project’s designers, offered a succinct review of the design work to date, including the pros and cons of each site.
“Both of the sites are quite small or constricted given the educational program,” said LaRue. “It’s going to be a challenge to manage the traffic on each of them.”
There are wetlands issues at both sites and challenges related to competing uses that restrict the area available for construction laydown space and other construction-related activities.
DeFazio’s major advantage is its flat topography, which would assist the construction effort and allow a three-story building that would better facilitate the school committee’s preferred educational plan.
By contrast, building at the back of the current Pollard site on a more challenging footprint would require a four-story building on a sloped site that School Committee members said would be less amenable to executing their preferred educational plan.
But building at DeFazio would disrupt the use of its playing fields, likely in the short term, and the Park and Recreation Commission fears perhaps for years. This has led Park and Rec to vote to not relinquish its jurisdiction over land needed for the school project, further complicating a required state-level approval for converting open space to a new use.
“DeFazio has a lot of appeal, but ultimately, we’d be signing up for extra headaches that we don’t want to have to deal with,” said Select Board member Kevin Keane.
Even if Park and Rec were to support a transfer of land out of its jurisdiction, Town Manager King said the transfer would still require a two-thirds vote of Town Meeting. And even if Town Meeting approved the transfer, the town would still have to go through multiple state processes required to change the use of any land previously designated for conservation, recreation or open space.
King explained that Town Meeting would need to approve a home-rule petition requesting the Legislature to approve a change in use for the land. This would require two-thirds approval in both the House and Senate.
The cumulative time spent would be measured in months and could ultimately cause the project to miss MSBA deadlines and risk taking Needham out of the state reimbursement program.
“It seems clear to many, or at least to some, that DeFazio is an improbable site. Not impossible, but improbable,” Gutekanst said while offering a review of the planning done to date.
Contacted after the summit, Gutekanst said he was “very concerned about the schedule, especially with DeFazio still on the table.” He said the Dec. 18 deadline will now be difficult to meet.
“It’s increasingly clear that there are significant concerns with the parcel that I don’t believe will be sorted out in time to send one option by Dec. 18. Keeping DeFazio on the table is distracting at this point for both the designer and the community.
“I will need to consult with the School Committee first before making any recommendations to the SBC to lengthen the timeline, which, in effect, delays the project by a half or full year and increases costs between 3% and 5%.”
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