Appropriation Committee Report to 2024 Special Town Meeting

This text is from the Appropriation Committee Report to Special Town Meeting 2024-1, pages 7-10.

Executive Summary

The Committee is unanimous in recommending disapproval of the motion under this article. This executive summary covers a few highlights of our analysis.

Current enrollment trends in lower grades suggest that high school enrollment could begin to decline over the next few years, but the current high school would remain significantly overcrowded for the next 5 years or more and unprepared to handle a large influx of new students.

We agree that there is great uncertainty about the pace of development under the MBTA Communities zoning, and its future impact on school enrollment. Even if every development application submitted to the Town comes to fruition, the number of public school students that would live in the new units is difficult to project. In any case, the Town retains the ability to update its zoning bylaws in order to moderate future development.

The current designs allow for expansion up to 2,895 students at 85% utilization, which could be pushed to 3,065 students at 90% utilization. At that point, rather than increasing the population of the high school, we believe the School Department would begin to consider redistributing the ninth grade to the middle schools to avoid having a single school with well over 3,000 students.

Splitting the project into two major phases that are started years apart would likely increase the total project cost by a large amount, and there is no guarantee the MSBA would fund a second phase in a timely manner. The delay between phases would drastically increase the financial risks to the Town by extending the use of facilities at the current high school that are reaching, or have already passed, their end of life. The wait for a second phase means most of the existing issues in the current buildings would linger for an uncertain number of years.

While the second phase remains completely unspecified, we expect it would involve a complete renewal of the remaining buildings. This negates any design options that are not in-place renewal, and it raises awkward questions for the design of the first phase.

Imposing a multi-year delay between phases would ultimately degrade the educational experience for many more students, while increasing the time before the center athletic fields could be restored to regular use.

Discussion

The Appropriation Committee has sent a non-voting liaison to meetings of the School Building Committee (SBC) since its inception and has been following the project development closely since it began. We also heard from this article’s proponent before the citizen’s petition for this warrant article was filed.

Over many years, the Committee has supported the high school project, and we have helped to shape financial policies that will enable this project to move forward. The motion under this article proposes a non-binding resolution with no direct financial impact, but we offer our perspective because the article envisions a retreat and a retrenchment from a major goal of the Town at a critical point in the project timeline, with major financial consequences.

The proposed resolution asks the Select Board, the School Committee, the School Building Committee, and Lexington’s state legislators to request a significant change in the ongoing MSBA-guided development process for Lexington High School in response to uncertainty about future school enrollment. Proponents note that construction of new residences under the MBTA Communities zoning will bring new families to Lexington, and this is certain to increase enrollment throughout the school system. Since the timing, distribution across grades, and overall magnitude of increases in school enrollment are difficult to predict, the proponents suggest delaying any major construction until the Town has better knowledge about the impending changes.

This new approach would essentially discard all previously developed LHS designs that have been considered by the SBC, particularly where in-place renovation/reconstruction was not used. The project would be split into two phases, imposing a delay between the phases of from two to five years, and it would ask the MSBA to provide supplemental funding for both phases.

The motion provides no details for either phase, but proponents have suggested that the first phase could address the current overcrowding at LHS by demolishing the World Language building and replacing it with a larger four story 172,000 sq. ft. building. Deficiencies in the remaining LHS buildings and any further response to enrollment changes would be addressed in the second phase.

LHS Enrollment

A major point of concern for the proponents is the initiation of development for more than a thousand new dwelling units under the MBTA Communities zoning overlay districts adopted at the 2023 Annual Town Meeting. It is important to recognize that not all these developments will necessarily proceed to completion, and those that do may ultimately result in fewer units than described in their initial applications. Nevertheless, the number and scale of applications suggests that a notable growth wave is coming. In determining the target enrollment capacity for the new high school, it is important to analyze the potential for increased school enrollment arising from this residential development, which will impact every public school in Lexington.

There are strong reasons to proceed with the current project designs using the target enrollment of 2,395 together with expansion space for up to 500 additional students, for a total nominal capacity of 2,895 students.

• Lexington’s elementary school (K-5) enrollment has dropped from 3,203 in June 2018 to 2,546 in October 2024, a decrease of just over 20%. Since the future high school population is largely fed by students from our elementary schools, this trend will tend to reduce LHS enrollment as the smaller cohorts advance through the grades. This will at least partially offset the influx of new students. The midpoint of the high school cohorts is grade 10.5, while for elementary schools it is grade 2.5, suggesting that high school enrollments, excluding additional students coming from newly built residences, would tend to follow a trend similar to that of the elementary schools but delayed about eight years.
• While the pace of development under the MBTA Communities umbrella is faster than projected when Article 34 was approved, we do not yet know if this is a short-lived burst of development for properties that were ripe for “upgrade”, or if the development will continue unabated.
• The Town retains the authority to modify its zoning bylaws at future town meetings to reduce the pace of development.
• One can envision scenarios in which a substantial numbers of MBTA Communities residences are built, but LHS enrollments do not exceed the limit of 2,895 students. There are currently 2,420 LHS students in a town with about 12,000 residences, a ratio of 0.2 high school students per residence (not accounting for the small number of non-resident students, e.g., METCO students). Under the MBTA Communities zoning, we anticipate many smaller dwelling units to be built, with a larger proportion of one- and two-bedroom units compared to the existing housing inventory. This suggests that the ratio of high school students from new developments may be less than or equal to the current ratio of 0.2 per dwelling unit. As an illustration, assume that 2,000 new units are built under the MBTA zoning and the ratio of high school students per unit holds steady at 0.2. If the number of high school students from existing residences declines by only 5% (compared with the actual 20% decline in elementary enrollments since 2018) then the high school enrollment would reach roughly 2,700 students, which is well within the expanded capacity options in the current designs.
• Finally, the current high school has been struggling with overcrowding for years, and it is simply incapable of handling continued increases in enrollment. Core components that are already strained by overcrowding, such as the library, gym and cafeteria, would not be enlarged for years under the plan proposed by this motion. The need for a larger and redesigned high school is urgent and unavoidable.

Expansion options in the current designs

We know from experience that a large high school building has a great deal of flexibility in the number of students it can support. The current high school is at roughly 98% utilization, meaning that it is severely overcrowded. That’s a real problem, yet even at this extreme the school continues to function.

The target enrollment capacity of the new designs assumes a nominal 85% utilization of available classrooms and certain other spaces. Current designs include 20,000 sq. ft. for the School Administration (“Central Office”), but if necessary, that space could be converted into 12 classrooms to accommodate another 250 or so students. The designs also include an option for a future building addition that, combined with the space initially designated for the Central Office, would increase capacity by 500 students, for a total enrollment capacity of 2,895 at 85% classroom utilization.

Increases above 2,895 students are still possible, but this implies a higher utilization level. At 90% utilization, the school would have 3,065 students, and at 95% utilization, the enrollment would hit 3,235 (an additional 340 students). In circumstances where the space utilization is 90% or less, the building would be somewhat overcrowded but would not be subject to the extreme overcrowding in the high school today

Both the Superintendent and the School Committee have expressed serious concerns about increasing the size of a high school beyond the maximum capacity of the proposed designs. In brief, the practicalities of operating a high school do not scale well with an enrollment in excess of 3,000 students. If enrollment continued to grow past that point, the Town would likely have to consider a new school building to offload enrollment from the high school.

Delays and cost escalation

Delaying the start of construction will be very costly, not only in terms of construction costs and soft costs, but also in the quality of education we are providing to public school students. Town staff has estimated that every year of delay would increase the total project cost by $15 to $20 million

Much of the infrastructure in the present high school, e.g., HVAC boilers, piping, control systems and roofs, are in poor condition and may fail at any time. Extending the time by years before those systems are replaced greatly increases the risk that the Town will face costly emergency repairs, while temporarily losing use of parts of the high school.

There is no precedent in the history of MSBA funding for an extended two-stage project as proposed here. In other large multi-phase developments, the MSBA has required separate statements of interest, which must each undergo the complete formal MSBA process of review, development, and funding approvals. We waited patiently for several years before our current statement of interest was accepted by the MSBA. It could be five to ten or more years before they are ready to consider a second one from the Town.

Problems with the two-stage concept

Overcrowding creates problems in many areas of the existing high school, e.g., there is insufficient space for students to eat lunch in the cafeteria, the science labs are inadequate, choke points in hallways create major traffic jams, many classrooms are well below standard size, the gym is too small, etc. The construction of a 172,000 sq. ft. building could alleviate some overcrowding issues, but many fundamental problems related to core functions such as those provided in the cafeteria and gym would remain.

It is not clear how the uses of the spaces built in the first stage would be coordinated with the uses of the spaces built in the second stage. If a 172,000 sq. ft. building constructed for the first stage includes supplementary eating and gym space, for example, then it is not clear what would become of those spaces once fully adequate eating and gym spaces are provided in the second phase.

We have no clear idea of what a stage two might involve, but at a minimum it would have to address the remaining problems we have already identified that require attention today, necessitating an almost complete renewal of the facility. Furthermore, this stage two would presumably be implemented as a phased-in-place project. The current work by the design team has shown that:

• Phased-in-place construction on the existing footprint is far more expensive than the alternative.
• Multiple phases during a phased-in-place approach can almost double the construction timeline.
• Phased-in-place construction is far more disruptive to the operation of the school, and to the education received by students during construction.

Each of the two phases in the proposed concept would require modular classrooms and potentially other temporary structures be installed, likely on the athletic fields, before construction could begin

Impact on Athletic Fields

Since even a phased-in-place construction project impacts the recreation complex fields due to construction access, lay-down areas, and the possible installation of geothermal wells, a longer project timeline with two stages implies that the nearby athletic fields would be impacted for a much longer time than in the current single stage concepts

One current design option would build on the fields, splitting the current athletic field complex into two areas with the high school sitting in between. The proponents of this article argue that the resulting loss of contiguity in the athletic field complex is qualitatively undesirable. However, no specific problems have been identified - the number and quality of the fields will be at least as good after completion of the project as they are now, and bathroom facilities to serve users of the fields on the Waltham St. side of a new building may be provided in the new building in this design option.

Conclusion

The Town cannot delay action on the high school project, in spite of the uncertainties we face. All the current SBC designs already provide sufficient enrollment capacity to handle the largest high school that the Town would want to operate. We are not convinced that a drastic change in strategy is required at this time. Rather, we assert that the strategy proposed in this article would produce highly undesirable results.