Longmeadow Public Schools Superintendent M. Martin O’Shea answers questions about the middle school project.
Reminder Publishing photo by Sarah Heinonen
LONGMEADOW — With two months to go before Longmeadow residents vote on whether to fund the new combined middle school, the Middle School Building Committee is hosting a series of informational sessions and school tours to make its case.
The project would cost approximately $151.59 million.
The Massachusetts School Building Authority, a semi-independent entity that uses state sales tax funds to offset the municipal cost of building and repairing schools, has approved $53.77 million worth of reimbursements, leaving the town responsible for about $97.82 million.
The proposed school would be built on the site of Williams Middle School at 410 Williams St. The location has been the facet of the middle school project to receive the most pushback, primarily from a small group of abutters.
It was mainly those abutters that attended the July 7 informational session hosted at the Longmeadow Adult Community Center. No new information was presented at the event, which was set up informally. Superintendent M. Martin O’Shea, School Committee Chair and member of the Middle School Building Committee Nicole Choiniere, Glenbrook Middle School Principal Nikcole Allen, Assistant Superintendent for Finance and Operations Thomas Mazza and Dorrie Brooks of the architectural firm Jones-Whitsett were on hand to answer the community’s questions.
Abutters were largely concerned with traffic. They said students from both schools would all be coming to one location, doubling the number of vehicles entering and exiting the site. O’Shea told them, “Double the kids does not mean double the traffic.”
O’Shea said, “With the design, it’s been a point of emphasis to be responsive to the residents.” He pointed to the inclusion of a turning lane in front of the school and sidewalks on the south side of Williams Street. These would help ease traffic congestion and encourage children to walk to school, respectively. Further, Brooks assured the residents that she would speak with the town about installing ample crosswalks along Williams Street.
“I would never say there won’t be traffic,” O’Shea said. However, he noted that the town’s six schools are all in residential areas, including the high school, which had 896 students enrolled in the 2024-25 school year.
The new middle school has been designed to serve Longmeadow’s educational needs for the next half century. The school would combine students from the existing Glenbrook and Williams middle schools and is expected to see an enrollment of 665 students. O’Shea said the “core spaces” — the gymnasium, cafeteria and auditorium — “are large enough to support more students than projected.”
He said he did not expect to see the student body grow substantially, as school enrollment figures across the Pioneer Valley have been declining over the past decade. “I would point to regional economics to explain the decline in the school age population. There’s been a steeper decline in Western Mass. than in the rest of the state,” O’Shea said.
The neighbors were not satisfied with the answers given to their concerns. Brooks told them that the Planning Board has all the documents and the traffic study for the project and would hold the contractor to account for anything that does not adhere to the town’s bylaws. At the end of the day, she said, “It’s a school being turned into a school in an area zoned for it.”
Brooks spoke with abutters about how the site was selected, explaining that the Middle School Building Committee used a rubric that included several variables to score each of the potential sites, including Glenbrook, Turner Field and Russell Field. In fact, the location of the Williams campus is part of why it was chosen for the combined school.
“Williams Middle School sits in the geographic center of town,” O’Shea said, adding that the dividing line that determines which school students attend runs down the middle of Williams Street. Because of this, he said there are students who live “essentially across the street” from Williams who are bused to Glenbrook but could walk to Williams.
Some residents said they had heard rumors that the existing Glenbrook Middle School would be demolished and replaced with another middle school. When asked about this, O’Shea said, “That’s news to me.” To his knowledge, he said, no decision had been made on future uses for the Glenbrook site.
Another information session will take place at the Adult Community Center on July 30 at 1 p.m. Tours of Glenbrook Middle School will be conducted on Sept. 22 at 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Williams Middle School tours will happen on July 23, also at 9 a.m. and 6 p.m. Residents will vote on whether to approve funding the middle school project at a Town Meeting Sept. 9 and a special election will take place Sept. 30 to decide whether to approve the funding mechanism: a debt exclusion.
