We’ve all been reading about the upcoming debt exclusion to fund reconstruction of the Wellington Elementary School and other “expensive items,” as the Belmont Citizen Herald referred to them. What’s harder to grasp from a news story is why a total overhaul at Wellington is necessary. Wellington, after all, was one of just 49 schools state wide to be selected by the Massachusetts School Building Authority for a Feasibility Study, so obviously the State thinks things are pretty dire. But parents (myself included) who don’t have children at the school may not sense the urgency of the situation there. God knows I didn’t, which is why I was glad I took a tour with Wellington parent Karen Parmett and Wellington’s facilities director just before the Tuesday School Committee Meeting.
Whether its outdated heating and electrical systems that run operating costs up 50% per child, half century old heating systems that make some students swelter while others bundle up, windowless classrooms in the basement or sinkholes in the parking lot…this school needs a radical makeover. To help the BB community see for themselves, I took along my handy Canon Powershot and made some videos from the tour. Over the next couple days, I’m going to be uploading them and letting you, the BloggingBelmont audience, check out the Wellington tour — raw and unedited — and decide for yourself.
Tags: Belmont, Belmont Public Schools, Karen Parmett, New Wellington, Video Tour, Wellington Elementary
December 14, 2007 at 5:08 pm |
I think it’s great we have a blog like this for Belmont. I have a child at Wellington, and next year I will have two. I support fixing problems like the ones shown in the tour.
However, my issue with how Wellington is being approached is that it’s not about repairs as you write here and elsewhere, it’s about new construction. All these projects–Wellington, the senior center, the library–are about new construction: tearing the whole thing down and starting over from scratch. And the new construction always comes with a high price tag.
When one probes deeper, one is told that new construction is less expensive than repairs would be. Furthermore, one is told that a committee has done a study, it has taken them 5 years, and they have examined all the angles and come up with the very best, perfect, proposal. And, they have put their proposal in a slick, detailed power point presentation in order to sell it to YOU.
The next 5-10 years seem to be spent trying to sell the perfect proposal to the public. The public gets to vote, but the vote is only a yes/no decision on the perfect proposal. It’s not a vote with any real alternatives or any room for compromise. If you don’t like what they’re selling, there’s nothing else to buy. The process strikes me as somewhat undemocratic.
Look at the Wellington website, under the “New Wellington School” link. There is a presentation there, which says: “At the April 2001 Town Meeting, I reported that the Wellington Feasibility Study committee and the School committee unanimously favored a new Wellington school rather than a renovation of the existing building. We continue to believe that a new Wellington School is the most prudent, most cost-effective, and most forward-looking alternative for an elementary school at the Orchard St. site.”
Let me repeat the date of this statement: April 2001. It’s now almost 2008. My daughter, who was 2 in 2001, is now in 3rd grade at Wellington and will be long gone before anything is done. I don’t understand how this is either prudent or cost-effective. It’s so forward-looking that I need binoculars to see it.
The senior center was a good example of this phenomenon too, in my opinion. Before that vote, there were bumper stickers with slogans like “if you don’t need it now, think about when you’re 64.” If you didn’t vote for the perfect, committee-approved, gold-plated, costly proposal, it was implied you didn’t care about seniors. Unlike Wellington, this one has even been approved by voters, but, like Wellington, nothing has actually been done on it. How is this caring for seniors? I’m in my 40’s. Will we still be talking when it’s going to be built when I’m 64?
I think what we need to get more of Belmont on board with doing something about Wellington is a way of giving the voters some alternatives. Don’t just try to hard sell the public on the perfect, gold-plated, power-pointed new Wellington proposal. Let us vote on a few different proposals: include new construction as one of the alternatives but also include some halfway measures that cost less and give our kids some relief without making their parents buy the whole farm all at once.
December 14, 2007 at 8:27 am |
Great points, all of them, Karen. A similar argument could be made about the library, which has been debated and studied, from what I understand, since the early 90s, at least. In the meantime, the cost to the town for a new building during that time has risen by 10x (now that we’ve got to compete for construction materials with China). Doing nothing is, of course, a decision that also has costs, even though it might not seem like it at the time.
With the “build vs. repair” thing — from what I understand, it’s really the same thing that contractors will tell you: renovating your existing home will cost you $200 a sq foot (or whatever) because you’ve got to work within the existing structure, retrofit, tweak, etc. Tear it down and build from scratch, and the cost is half that. With Wellington, not all parts of that school are handicapped accessible, There are two separate (old) heating systems, the floor plan is a patchwork of spaces built over the years, the elevator that is there can’t accommodate all kinds of wheelchairs, etc. You start talking about trying to “fix” that stuff but leave the structure in place, and a teardown very quickly becomes the less expensive solution to the problem, not a more expensive one.
December 14, 2007 at 1:24 pm |
Somehow the “teardown is cheaper than rebuilding from scratch” argument still seems like it doesn’t take something important into account–maybe it’s the timing. Or it glosses over a well-founded (in my opinion) mistrust of cost claims about big new construction projects in the Big Dig era.
My point is, this doesn’t have to be construed as one problem with one solution where the only choice the voters get is accept or reject. What if, in 2001, they’d fixed just the heater? Nothing else, just that, at 2001 prices. Yes, we’d still have the sinkholes and the small classrooms and the bad elevator here in 2007. But we have those anyway, and the bad heater too. That’s just my quick example; I haven’t spent as much time thinking about these issues as many others have, and I could easily be wrong in the specifics of what’s most important. But what bugs me is that there isn’t even an effort being made at prioritization: the voters face an all-or-none choice.
I think it’s a sort of basic psychology at work here: most voters like to think they are “moderate” rather than extreme, and that they weigh “both sides” of an issue before making a decision. So if the committee instead gave the voters 2-3 viable proposals of varying cost (in addition to the do-nothing status quo) to vote on, I predict the one perceived as middle-of-the-road in cost and hassle would get the most votes. Doing nothing would be seen as the extreme that it is. It isn’t seen as extreme now because to some voters, it’s the lesser of two evils.
April 8, 2008 at 9:37 pm |
I recently turned over to the New Wellinton committee an article that I wrote in 2001 detailing why a new Wellington was needed. It is now posted on their site as a file. A large portion of the article is now outdated in terms of the options being proposed and the cost estimates; however the basic information presented on why the building needs to be looked at comprehensively is still accurate.
The devil is always in the details. Anytime you do a major renovation to a school building, there is a monatary threshold that you reach that triggers the need to make the building fully ADA compliant. If memory serves me, it is based on a % of the total renovation cost. When you talk about ADA compliance, it is more than fixing elevators. It entails widening doors on all the classrooms, hallways, etc, bathrooms, classroom sizes. There are a lot of variables at play. Each decision triggers another.
Having sat on some of these committees, I can assure you that as taxpayers ourselves, we are looking at the bottem line. However, the reality is that sometimes it is less expensive and the end product is a better product when the building is completely redone. In fact, a major problem at the Wellington stems from the fact that it is a series of renovations all tied together at various stages. The music room, cafeteria and gym are original to the old High School, before the academic area of that building burned down. A new Wellington building hopefully will meet the needs of the community for the next 100 years, and so should be thought about comprehensively, not just from a short term solution perspective.
April 15, 2008 at 8:42 pm |
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June 10, 2008 at 4:32 pm |
[...] those of us in town who will shortly be pushing for a debt exclusion to fund the construction of a new Wellington Elementary, as well as for town leaders who are desperately hoping to pass an operational override come budget [...]