Over the course of this fall, Newton Public Schools (NPS) presented its first comprehensive long-range facilities plan since 2019. This follows a Demographic Study and ten-year projection completed by Cropper GIS McKibben in late 2024, following the dissolution of the Underwood-Ward Task Force, which had been created by the previous School Committee but encountered lack of clear direction. The recent meetings culminated in a vote at the December 15 School Committee meeting to proceed with MSBA applications for Ward and Underwood elementary schools, with the School Committee moving forward with its goal to get as many students into new buildings as possible, in whatever way is politically and financially viable.
This fall’s events included:
- September 24 School Committee Meeting
- October 23 Long-Range Planning Working Group Forum at Bigelow
- October 28 Long-Range Planning Working Group Forum at Bigelow
- November 6 School Committee Public Hearing
- November 20 Newton Corner Neighborhood Association Meeting
- December 3 School Committee Meeting
- December 15 School Committee Meeting
The NPS Long-Range Planning Working Group (LRPWG) currently includes Superintendent Dr. Anna Nolin; Stephanie Gilman, Director of Planning; Liam Hurley, CFO; and School Committee Members Emily Prenner, Tamika Olszewski, and Chris Brezski, chair.
Incoming School Committee Chair Alicia Piedalue, Incoming School Committee Member Arrianna Proia, and Incoming Mayor Marc Laredo attended the meeting with the November Newton Corner Neighborhood Association.
The MSBA
This fall’s planning and community engagement coincided with the School Committee’s need to decide whether to submit a Statement of Interest (SOI) to the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) for the next projects in the NPS construction pipeline. The MSBA is a government agency within the State Treasurer’s Office, operating separately but in cooperation with the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education. The MSBA is funded entirely at the state level with $.01 of every Massachusetts sales tax dollar, and it allocates its funds via grants to municipal and regional school building projects. With 26 school buildings, Newton has a long history of working closely with the MSBA to apply for funding, and the City has a strong record of securing funding in this competitive process. Newton has successfully received money from the MSBA’s precursor for Newton North High School and from the MSBA for Angier, Cabot, and Countryside. Franklin was also put through the Statement of Interest process concurrently with Countryside, but did not receive an award.
Several Committee members have also stated that even when the City is not applying directly for MSBA funding for a project, it still uses the MSBA’s process because, as Mayor Fuller said, “The MSBA is one of the few state programs that works really, really well.” The LRPWG’s position is that the SOI process involves significant staff time to prepare materials, therefore any delay in the Committee’s recommendations regarding how to draft applications further delays construction of any new buildings in the district. The current LRPWG wanted to complete this task before the seating of the new School Committee to allow staff to make progress during the on-boarding time for the largely-new Committee.
Based on the current state of the City budget, the City will need to put a debt-exclusion override before voters for any new building construction. While Dr. Nolin maintained at the October 23 event that district staff are not approaching their recommendations for optimal facilities from a cost-savings perspective, members of the public have asked about the economic impact of various scenarios. By her estimate, maintaining any two schools vs. one school has a marginal operating expense for staff and maintenance of about $2 million annually, not accounting for the potential offset of additional transportation costs. School Committee chair Brezski further discussed construction costs: “…in 2025 dollars, it would be about the difference of about $35 million” in additional construction costs for two buildings vs. one, amortized over the life of any new City debt.
Ward and Underwood
Now that building needs at Angier, Zervas, Cabot, Lincoln Eliot, Countryside, Franklin, and Horace Mann are completed or in the works, the next most urgent buildings are Ward and Underwood. At the October Community Forums the LRPWG stated they wanted to maintain transparency in anticipation of a change that has been made to the MSBA SOI application form regarding school consolidation, while the Ward and Underwood school communities appeared to push back against being lumped together.
Because Massachusetts has had one of the largest post-Covid enrollment declines in the nation, Dr. Nolin said at the October 23rd meeting that the MSBA has changed its application to include the question of whether the municipality is considering school consolidation as part of its planning process: “Pre-Covid, there wasn’t a box about consolidation, there was a question on the MSBA form ‘are you making these recommendations due to overcrowding.’ That was a question that has now been eliminated from the SOI. This consolidation question has come up only post-Covid because we’re not unique. Most of Metrowest and Massachusetts is dealing with enrollment declines across their school-age population.”
Even with the overall statewide enrollment decline, Brezski’s big takeaway from the McKibben demographic report was that “a lot of the enrollment decline we’ve seen is likely to be very cyclical in nature, as opposed to more permanent, and that’s a function of the age and demographics of the neighborhood and what houses turn over.” Nonetheless, Brezski’s position was that, because of the cost differential, it was a responsibility of the School Committee to at least consider consolidation before putting an override before voters.
All of the members of the LRPWG repeatedly attempted to assure residents that checking the box that the School Committee is considering consolidation options as part of the process of making a decision does not lock the School Committee into definitely consolidating Underwood and Ward. Few attendees of the forums seemed reassured by this stance.
NPS’s Long Range Planning Memo to the School Committee from September 24 suggests that the district would like clarity sooner rather than later because “The district will be reviewing student assignment areas starting in January 2026 to be ready with any proposed adjustments in time for the opening of the new Countryside and Franklin schools [in 2027]. It would be helpful to have direction on whether to include consolidation of Ward and Underwood in that process.”
Taking options off the table
In previous meetings during the days of the Task Force, City and District officials maintained that all options were on the table. This fall, the LRPWG identified four possible scenarios and took the first two of them off the table:
- Continue operating status quo in both buildings indefinitely
- Close both Ward and Underwood Schools
- Rebuild/renovate both Ward and Underwood schools
- Consolidate Ward and Underwood schools
The first (continuing to operate both schools as-is) was taken off the table because the condition of both buildings is inequitable for students compared with the newer buildings in the rest of the district. Both buildings are in disrepair, and neither meets the needs of the current educational program. This includes classroom spaces that are not large enough, a lack of breakout spaces for support sessions, a lack of accessibility, and insufficient cafeteria and program spaces.
The second (closing both schools) has been taken off the table because it would leave a geographically large portion of the city without a school, and it would require redistricting all of the elementary schools in the city.
Brezski went on to say: “I don’t think either of these buildings is renovatable, given their condition,” and that the plan is to either rebuild both of these schools or build a consolidated school in some form. This assertion is supported by the Perkins Eastman 2024 Facilities report and estimates for repairs at each building approaching $20 million.
Lack of movement on defining neighborhood schools for Newton
With that in mind, Brezski said that over the past year and a half he has tried to engage the current School Committee on the question of “How do we define a Neighborhood School?” including floating two possible ideas based on current footprint and historic enrollment:
1) Most students should be within a 3/4 mile radius of a school
2) A neighborhood school should not exceed 500 students.
While there was some discussion on these topics, no consensus was reached, and the LRPWG continues to have no directive from the School Committee in this regard.
Brezski emphasized his continued belief in the importance of such a directive by offering a historical reflection: “If I was on the committee back when we were deciding about Lincoln-Eliot and Horace Mann, and Franklin and all that swath of Northside schools, with Underwood still sitting there obviously as a building in need, too…when you look at the maps, Lincoln-Eliot completely overlaps the three-quarter-mile radius of Cabot, Horace Mann, and Underwood. I don’t know why that discussion didn’t happen, I wasn’t part of it. It probably should have happened, in fact, there probably should have been a more comprehensive discussion of this whole concept of ‘neighborhood schools’ and what does it mean and what do we want our footprint to look like? That probably should have happened in a far more robust way before we started Angier, Cabot, and Zervas.”
The Long-Range Planning Timeline charts also have a history of silence on Underwood. In the 2015 MSBA Cabot feasibility study Long Range Planning Draft Timeline, Underwood was not slated for renovation and instead, its column has a box for FY32 as a possible “Pre-K or Back to…” with the implication that it has been considered for closure for at least 10 years. In the 2017 Long Range Planning draft, it was left off entirely. Now, on the 2025 Draft Facilities Long Range Plan, it is listed side-by-side with Ward, but with Ward students being allocated the swing space at 191 Pearl Street.
Incoming School Committee Chair Alicia Piedalue, a Ward Parent, and incoming Mayor Marc Laredo seemed to bring a new perspective to the November 20 meeting with the Newton Corner Neighborhood Association. Piedalue asserted that Ward was highlighted for using the 191 Pearl Street swing space just because Ward was first on the list, and it could easily be amended to “Ward or Underwood” instead. At the same meeting, Laredo maintained that he is a “very strong proponent of the neighborhood school model in Newton” and that “walkable schools are very important.” He added that many “kids from Ward could walk to Underwood, it would be harder the other way around.”
Contrary to much of the public discourse, Underwood and Ward are not the two smallest schools in the district according to all metrics. According to the Perkins Eastman School Facilities & Enrollment Planning Study, Underwood, Ward, and Williams tie for the smallest design enrollments. Peirce currently has an enrollment comparable to Underwood, and Williams’s enrollment is comparable to Ward’s.
- Peirce: Design Enrollment: 300, FY24 Enrollment: 236
- Underwood: Design Enrollment: 276, FY24 Enrollment: 242
- Ward: Design Enrollment: 276, FY24 Enrollment: 212
- Williams: Design Enrollment: 276, FY24 Enrollment 215
In terms of site size, Underwood has the smallest site of an active NPS school (1 acre), compared with five other school sites:
- 191 Pearl St. (Old Lincoln-Eliot): 1 acre
- Cabot: 1.77 acres, augmented to 1.84 through eminent domain during the rebuilding process
- Zervas: 3.5 usable acres, augmented by acquisition of 3 abutting properties
- Angier: 2 acres
- Ward: 3.1 acres
Residents’ views and a new twist
As School Committee member Emily Prenner (Ward 5) acknowledged at the December 3rd School Committee meeting, 99% of feedback that the School Committee has received has been against consolidation. This was borne out in public statements made at the fall community events, with the most common reason given being the sense of community and civic engagement generated by neighborhood schools.
Underwood constituents expressed frustration that their school is being considered for consolidation even though its enrollment has bounced back and is now higher than that of Peirce or Williams. Ward constituents expressed frustration that their school is being considered for consolidation even though its academic performance is one of the best in the City, and they claimed that the terrible building condition has been deterring enrollment for years. Both groups emphasized that their neighborhood school fills a civic niche in villages that do not have socially-oriented village centers.
At the October Forums, Superintendent Nolin and Chair Brezski brought up the idea of looking at the hundred-year planned useful life of these buildings and thinking about how an educational program that included Universal Pre-K might affect decisions about the optimal size of school buildings. This idea had not previously been presented publicly in the long-range planning process, and it was echoed by Alicia Piedalue and Mayor-Elect Laredo at the Newton Corner Neighborhood Association meeting. If both sites (or more expansively, all the Newton elementary schools) were designated for Universal Pre-K, that could add an additional 50 students to each school and would significantly change the enrollment projections and building needs.
