HAMPDEN — The Hampden Wilbraham Regional District School Committee is one step closer to getting a decision from the select boards about withdrawing Wilbraham Middle School from the Massachusett School Building Authority’s accelerated repair program and joining the core program.
All three groups met at the Hampden Selectboard meeting on Dec. 2 to bring Hampden into the discussion held previously by the School Committee and the Wilbraham Select Board.
The idea was originally floated by School Committee member Michael Tirabassi and Superintendent John Provost on Nov. 20 after deciding that the MSBA’s core program may be a better fit due to the building’s declining state. They sought advice from the Wilbraham Select Board on Nov. 24 and planned to bring in the Hampden Selectboard since a letter of support from both select boards would be a tremendous help in the application process, Tirabassi said.
“I will say personally, I think what you’re talking about is the right course of action,” Hampden Chair John D. Flynn said. “Otherwise, you’re just bandaiding it and we’re gonna be back in five years with more to do. This is the same thing we talked about with Minnechaug. You’re putting a new coat of paint on something that’s not gonna get us into the 21st century at that point.”
Provost reiterated his idea to the Selectboard that the middle school was built with the intent to be a junior high and isn’t adequate enough for today’s education philosophy. The school lacks technology innovations, classroom size and accommodations for special education. The building was also noted to have a “cell block design” with no windows in the cafeteria because they were believed to be a distraction when the building was completed.
“I think it’s good to go into the process with an open mind and the support of everyone, all the key stakeholders,” Tirabassi said. “You can really do a feasibility study to figure it out, because it all comes down to the kids, right?”
Tirabassi also said that based on the feasibility study in 2015, it isn’t a far stretch of imagination that a new building entirely could be needed.
Wilbraham Select Board discussed their MSBA experience at Minnechaug High School to get an idea of how much time it would take for necessary repairs to happen, especially if the application were to be denied. Minnechaug originally did a feasibility study in 2004, was invited into the MSBA project in 2008 and completed construction on a new building in 2012.
“For six years, the kids are in a place that should have been fixed 10 years ago, and there’s no intention of fixing it or doing anything about it,” Hampden Selectboard member Donald Davenport said. “What do we do for six years while these kids are sitting there?”
Wilbraham Select Board Chair Michael Squindo followed up Davenport’s concern and said that there isn’t a guarantee that they’ll be accepted into the core program after withdrawing from their current project, which brings them back to square one.
“There are still issues at the middle school that need to be addressed, maybe we’re not gonna do system overhauls, because we’re looking at the potential of not using that building or otherwise completely renovating it,” Squindo said. “We can’t just abandon repairs at the middle school by going through the core program. I think we could get tighter on what repairs are necessary to prevent catastrophic failure, but if the building were to close, where would we educate those kids?”
A few ideas that were brought to the table were focusing on and repairing the greatest needs of the building, putting the eighth grade class in Minnechaug or even regionalizing the middle school.
Wilbraham Select Board member Marc Ducey said with class population projected by the New England School Development Council to increase nearly 31% over the next 10 years, the current overcrowding problem in the middle school would just be shipped to the high school if the eighth grade were to move. If the middle school were to be regionalized, it would need to be regionalized in a renovated building.
“We’re already in a regional middle school situation,” Wilbraham Select Board member Susan Bunnell said. “The children of Hampden are in Wilbraham getting educated at the middle school, and it’s inadequate for both towns, it’s inadequate for everyone in the building.”
Bunnell also said they will have to address how they will get through the next few years while waiting on repairs.
From a financial standpoint, the application to the core program is free. If they are invited into the program, a feasibility study would then be around $600,000 to $700,000. Doing a new feasibility study pinpoints the exact current issues, rather than basing the repair ideas off the previous study from 2015, which showed failures among most major systems. Tirabassi said in a previous meeting on Nov. 20 that based on the 2015 study, repairs may be “many tens of millions of dollars.”
Provost told the Hampden Selectboard that he believes applying for the core program is a wise idea considering the amount of repairs needed. If they were to stay in the accelerated repair program and replace the windows and doors, there is still a large list of issues that need to be addressed, including overcrowding.
“So you fix the windows and doors, you get some money. You fix the HVAC, you get some money,” Davenport said. “But you still have a school with 773 kids in it made for probably 500.”
Squindo suggested the action right now should be focused on the “immediate educational wants, even if it’s a two-year fix,” he said. “Ulitimately at the end of the day, the towns are going to decide if we support this or we don’t,” Squindo said. “We’re willing to go along, but in order to really sell this we need to know how to get from ‘here to here.’”
Ducey said he wouldn’t be surprised if they were invited into the core program by the MSBA because “it’s inevitable to get into the core program, it’s just when.”
As of right now, the Wilbraham Select Board hasn’t made a decision of support and the Hampden Selectboard discussed it at their Dec. 8 meeting, after press time. Coverage of this meeting will appear in the Dec. 18 edition of The Reminder.
“I think if we took a straw vote, we would say ‘I think the same as you,’” Flynn said. “It’s gotta be done properly.”
