In its study on the affect of new housing on school enrollment, the Metropolitan Area Planning Council (MAPC) says “development of new housing units does not account for the changes in school enrollment in Massachusetts.”
That is clearly true for Massachusetts overall (per the document’s Figure 1) but looking at Lexington on their map and then at the Y-axis of their figure 7, one can see that Lexington’s school enrollments grew by roughly 13% over the study period with an increase in housing units of roughly 2.5% (X-axis), the 3rd smallest increase behind Bedford and Milton of the communities whose school enrollments grew significantly over the study period.
So MAPC’s conclusion that “development of new housing units does not account for the changes in school enrollment in Massachusetts” is simply WRONG for Lexington, I believe because Lexington is a MAGNET for families with children since our schools enjoy an excellent reputation.
That reputation exists not just in the greater Boston area but all the way to Taiwan: after my second son entered Clarke when we moved here from Cambridge “for the schools” in 1999, his best friend was a Taiwanese boy whose father, a landscape architect, had to move for work from Taiwan to the northeastern US; he was told IN Taiwan that “if you move to the northeastern US, you want to move to Lexington MA because of its schools.”
Lexington’s school enrollments may have gone up and down in previous decades (we should understand why: I don’t think we do now, but hopefully the School department is working on this) but since MAPC’s broad statewide conclusion does not apply to Lexington, my analysis remains perfectly valid as a first order look at what MBTA zoning on 227 acres may do to Lexington — i.e. possibly DOUBLE our population.
I therefore believe that it was/is irresponsible for:
– the Planning Board to not yet have analyzed this MBTA zoning issue in detail, telling us how many new dwellings in each of the 5 zoning “buckets” comprising the total 227 acres are physically possible; in short, the Planning Board continues to never do any planning, it issues unrealistic guesses like MBTA zoning on 227 acres will generate “~400-800 units in 4-10 years” (slide 14 of https://www.lexingtonma.gov/DocumentCenter/View/8463/Art-34-village-and-multi-family-slides?bidId=) instead;
– the School Committee for not even having opined at the 2023 Annual Town Meeting on article 34 (the new MBTA zoning for 227 acres); does the School Committee not realize that its KEY problem is to know how many new dwellings will happen in town and how they will drive enrollments, which in turn drive Town budgets (more so than say annual salary increases for teachers)?
– the Select Board for having supported 4-1 article 34 in 2023, instead of opposing it and asking that MBTA zoning apply to just the 50 State-mandated acres instead, and for not having yet told us how Lexington will get out of this HUGE 227 acres mess;
– the School Building Committee for not having yet instructed our architects to stop looking at an obviously undersized, overly expensive, project, and to look instead at a STAGED project that can handle the correct future high school enrollments we will see from new MBTA dwellings; if voters reject the necessary debt exclusion because they find a non-staged project too expensive and undersized, delays will be longer and we will lose MSBA funding.
I am not being critical here, just attempting to wake us all up to the fact that we, as a Town, do no planning whatsoever on our key issues, and ought to start doing that ASAP.
I mean no disrespect, but cannot read the entirety of your article – medical – but do want to BEG Lexington to be aware and to block in any way you can and seriously apply yourself efficaciously and with no room for “let’s have a hearing” – the proposed (WILL Go through unless a TON of people are VERY active) the development by BXP of 300 or 400 apartments in Lexington. The damage to neighbors will be immersurable. Infrastructure overload is toxic. I’ll write more when able, but too many broken bones and bleeding ears. PLEASE DON’T LET THIS HAPPEN TO MY HOMETOWN!!!! I don’t care how “attractive” it sounds. THIS IS LEXINGTON. Bad enough that trees fertilized by the blood of the Revolution were cut down and trees from Oklahoma and Canada (small, don’t block site-lines – you figure it out) – this is far worse. I will never play violin, piano, so many other instruments, hear other than agony, dance again? Walk again – no. Have my 90/60 pulse 52 driven to excruciating levels, my property destroyed, my body and life destroyed. DO NOT ALLOW THEM IN. PLEASE. I remember Mr. Michaelson so fondly (and so many) from when I was tiny – THEY LOVED THE TOWN. DO YOU? THIS IS LEXINGTON!!!!
Please research PLEASE.
Unfortunately the LHS4ALL group is well intentioned but is looking at hypothetical scenarios and not what is actually needed NOW. The group does not want to see that expansion is already built into the plans for a new HS. The new HS will easily be able to convert administrative space into 12 additional classrooms and the plan, per MSBA guidelines, has an option to build an addition at a later date. Additionally, the sizing of the HS is based on 85% usage. The current HS is at 98% usage. There will be space for growth.
Mr. Mehr’s group is not looking out for the needs of our students now but would rather have a slower build that will interrupt students and be prolonged beyond anything that would be reasonable and not have a clear path forward for what is needed. Additionally, some within the LHS4ALL group claim that they want to save money yet the only savings obtained from their plan would be short term and would cost us all more in the long term.
We all need to get behind the current needs of our town and students. Those who have put in countless hours to get us where we are in the planning process have considered growth and the POSSIBLE need for expansion once we have what is NOW needed for our students.
Please attend the up coming meeting on October 30 and find out what is actually happening and how everything has been thought of in accordance to the MSBA rules.
Nathaniel: you know who agrees with LEX4ALL’s position on this issue? Superintendent Hackett. Here she is pleading with the MSBA for a bigger school because she correctly fears the impact of Lexington’s reckless adoption of 4.5 times the acreage required by the MBTA Communities Act. https://www.lhs4all.com/_files/ugd/0cc18b_3d22d066208f4248a57af016b2b8c814.pdf
Alan – Dr. Hackett doesn’t ask for a bigger building in this memo, she requests consideration for more reimbursement from the state for the square footage already included in the current building designs. The current building designs already include space for more than 3,000 students. As school administration has said, if enrollment at LHS increases beyond this, we won’t be trying to build a bigger high school here – instead we will be looking at alternative solutions to address capacity district-wide. The SBC’s project is the most cost-effective, educationally appropriate solution for the LHS building project.
I think you are concerned about costs of the LHS project, and I can’t understand if/why you and LHS4all are advocating that Lexington build a bigger building – which will cost more. For example, it’s been reported that Brockton High School, a year or two behind us in the MSBA process and 100K bigger, may cost $1 Billion. Let’s not delay the Lexington project while costs continue to rise.
https://www.enterprisenews.com/story/news/education/2024/06/28/brockton-high-school-renovation-project-state-msba-approves-feasibility-study/74243833007/
Your issue seems to be with Lexington’s MBTA zoning changes, not the LHS project. As the town gathers more data on proposed and completed developments, I’m hopeful that Lexington may be able to refine and update the zoning changes we made to reduce the possibility of building more units than town infrastructure can handle. I urge people to join me in support of the SBC’s high school project – that will cost less than any larger, longer project Alan and lhs4all is promoting – and if you have concerns about the MBTA developments and how increasing population affects the whole town, reach out to Town leadership about their plans to address this.
That is a very generous interpretation, Brielle. The superintendent says that space originally intended for other purposes that were not eligible for reimbursement would likely be used to accommodate higher than designed for enrollment, and would the MSBA please reimburse us for that. I believe that to be closer to my interpretation than yours, but there’s no point on our debating semantics – we agree on quite a bit.
We live in the same neighborhood and have seen how much development is planned for it. Our town government badly underestimated the impact of the MBTA Communities Act. We should see how that plays out before committing 2/3 of a billion dollars on a school that even the superintendent is suggesting will be too small the day it opens.
LHA4ALL wants a right size school, not a bigger school necessarily.
The current building designs are expressly stated to be for 2395 students. Based on the uncertainty due to MBTA, nailing down a building size today is too risky. We need to approach the renovation in a step wise manner. We believe it can be done less expensively than has been proposed.
One cost saving approach is obvious – nix the CO in LHS from the start. It is a waste of money to configure square footage for an office if we suspect it’s going to be needed for classrooms right away.
OK, I’ll be critical. This letter fails to make any sort of clear point. The spreadsheet Mr Mehr links to uses colors in a way that is unreadable and actually hurts my eyes, but I would argue any analysis that suggests rezoning 227 acres (2.5% of Lexington’s total land area) is going to double our population is inherently invalid. I also disagree that anything going on right now constitutes a “mess”. The Planning Board’s estimate was not unrealistic given the circumstances at the time, and not making choices you agree with is not the same as “never [doing] any planning”. The idea that the School Committee should be responsible for providing an opinion on zoning changes is… I just… what? No. What kind of opinion would Mr Mehr like them to express? That we should not allow more housing to be built because new children are a cost burden?
Jay: Please see the document I linked to in my reply to Nathaniel, above. I neglected to add that one of the Select Board members reviewed and/or edited the document (we could tell from the metadata).
227 acres may only be 2.5% of Lexington land, but the densities of the MBTA zoning multiply the impact of that 2.5% many fold. It could indeed make a sizable impact on population and school enrollment.