School officials, town officials and design consultants held morning and evening listening sessions on July 9 designed to encourage public dialogue on the town’s plans for renovating Pollard Middle School.
The town is engaged with the Massachusetts School Building Authority and its highly structured process to address the numerous shortcomings at the nearly 70-year-old Pollard facility. The project is being guided by a School Committee master plan that also factors in the eventual replacement of the Mitchell Elementary School, which opened in 1951.
Both sessions were lightly attended and town officials said additional opportunities will be offered as planning proceeds on the significant construction effort. The meetings were held in the auditorium at Pollard and tours were offered after each session for residents to get a first-hand look at the state of the facility.
Participating in the MSBA process makes the town eligible for reimbursements that could cover more than 20% of the cost of construction on the Pollard project, currently estimated at around $314 million.
In return, it commits the town to following MSBA protocols, an established process with nine “modules” in which the MSBA and town must come to agreement in order for the project to be eligible for millions in reimbursements.
School Committee Vice Chair Alisa Skatrud opened both sessions with a brief overview of the process to date and what the town is hoping to do between now and early September.
“The school committee has been working over the past seven-plus years on master planning for our school buildings,” said Skatrud, who is also on the 15-member building committee for the Pollard effort.
Skatrud explained the schools hired an architectural firm to assess where both the Pollard and Mitchell facilities stood in relation to what the MSBA considers its “bare minimum” standards.
“To say that both Pollard and Mitchell failed on many, many counts would be an understatement,” she said.
The school master plan favors dealing first with Pollard before turning its attention to Mitchell. It has hired HMFH Architects as its designer to weigh the merits of eight options for proceeding. In September, the town will select three options to present to the MSBA.
The key decisions are a pair of binary choices:
- Should Pollard be configured as a Grade 6-8 school designed for 1,335 students or a Grade 7-8 school designed for 880 students?
- Should the project be an addition/renovation at the current Pollard site or new construction at another site (a parcel comprising the DeFazio Park parking lot and some DPW property is being considered)?
Whatever decisions are made will have an impact on the future of a third school, the current sixth grade center at the High Rock School. If the town opts for returning Pollard to its pre-2010 configuration as a Grade 6-8 middle school, High Rock would become available.
One version of the plan calls for High Rock to serve as a temporary site for Mitchell School students should a major project be approved for that school to be replaced.
The state of Pollard
“Children are safe in this building but there are systems that are being held together by the sheer ingenuity of our building maintenance department,” Skatrud said during the morning session. “That’s because parts are not available anymore for some of the systems — they are that old.”
The school’s capacity has been extended by the addition of modular classrooms along the school’s perimeter. Those modulars have been in place for 23 years, which is beyond their 20-year “useful life expectancy.”
There was little pushback on the notion that Pollard was in need of attention, but many residents seemed perplexed that the price tag for remedying those shortcomings would exceed $300 million.
“It’s an estimate,” noted Superintendent Dan Gutekanst. “A well thought-out estimate but still, at this point, an estimate.
“It’s a huge lift for this community, the largest project the community will have ever tackled. It does require this thoughtful consideration that the School Committee has put into it for the last several years.”
Several attendees asked that the town take the opportunity to create a quality auditorium or performance space as part of the project, noting that the town did not choose to do so more than a decade ago when Needham High School was undergoing renovation.
The MSBA does not provide any reimbursement for auditoriums and adding a performance space would be done totally at town expense.
Town officials said there will be more listening sessions and other meetings over the summer as they work toward narrowing down their choices to three options in September.
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