Tracy Novick: Prioritizing Public School Buildings

Saturday, March 03, 2012

Tracy Novick, GoLocalWorcester Education Contributor

Tracy Novick, GoLocalWorcester Education Contributor

When Treasurer Steve Grossman was in college, he took a class with Carlos Baker. Baker, a Princeton professor, was the leading critic on Ernest Hemingway, writing the seminal biography of the author. Thus when Grossman rounded the corner into Mrs. Rushton's Doherty classroom, he was thrilled to see Baker's name on the whiteboard, assigned as homework for the class reading Old Man and the Sea.

This was a just one of the exchanges during the Treasurer's whirlwind tour of three Worcester schools Wednesday, in his capacity as Chair of the Board of the Massachusetts School Buildings Authority. He, along with others from MSBA including their director Jack McCarthy, toured Doherty, South, and top priority Nelson Place.

These are not the only schools in need in the city. There was not time to tour Burncoat High, currently in danger of losing its accreditation with the New England Association of Schools and Colleges due to facility needs. These include a cafeteria that is far too small, a library that is small and outdated, and overcrowded conditions. There are consistent flooding issues. And the building, with its walls of windows, desperately needs new ones, both for energy and environmental reasons. We do not want Burncoat to lose its accreditation.

Nelson Place makes its own case, and it did so, as we stood in the basement, converted due to lack of space into a kindergarten room. The room was as bright as any elementary teacher could make it, but it still clear was the basement of a building built in 1927 that had run out of space. The treasurer's response, to universal agreement, was that clearly we need a new building, and he promised to see that happen.

When Nelson Place was built, construction was in a transition phase, and the school was built with a hybrid of old and new. As it happened, that particular combination of old and new—internal metal supports with exterior brick—did not work: the metal corroded over time, causing the mortar to crumble. The structure of the school is fundamentally unsound due to the way it was built.

Due to the shoring up that took place in 2005 and ongoing inspections since then, the school is not dangerous. We cannot, however, continue to squeeze kids into a building that is too small and supported by hydraulic jacks, accessed through protective fencing. It's not responsible. We were pleased that this principle was shared by Treasurer Grossman and Director McCarthy. We will hope for good news once their board meets later this spring.
Worcester East Middle School was built before that failed construction hybrid, and it shows. WEMS is a rock of a building that spans a city block, built in 1924, and well maintained since. Most of what it needs is a new roof to keep the rain out, and new windows to keep the heat in. It also has a chocolate box of a theater, that, with a little more love, could be a city showplace.

South High is another school that makes its own case. Built in 1978 at the tail end of the open classroom fad, South High has multiple classes being taught at the same time in each big room. Open classrooms were supposed to allow students to move from station to station, investigating different areas, but even the open classroom proponents never intended it to be done in secondary school. Over time, these spaces have come to be divided by cubicle dividers, filing cabinets, and nearly anything else teachers can find to have some way of separating math from physics from English. If you've ever worked in a sea of cubicles, you can imagine how little the half walls do to cut down on sound traveling from one to another. Imagine, if you will, eleven or twelve high school classes going on all at the same time in one space. Director McCarthy, having his first experience with open classrooms on our tour, got a taste of just how loud and distracting it can be to have all of those classes going on at once. He seemed stunned. It does a fundamental disservice to our students to pile them by the hundreds into open spaces, run classes all at once, and expect that somewhere in all of this, they'll scramble themselves an education.

They do, but it's harder than it needs to be.
You might consider it the school motto: South needs walls.

The renewed focus of both the city and the state on school buildings is heartening after years in which the decision was only which boiler could be replaced, nothing more. The attention we pay to the buildings in which the next generation learns speaks volumes about our priorities as a city and as a state. Our children need clean, well-lit, properly heated, structurally sound buildings with room to learn.

It's up to us to make that happen.