Julie Hackett, superintendent of Lexington Public Schools, sent two memos regarding Lexington High School’s new design and the town’s plans for new multifamily housing to LPS families over the past week. In those letters, she says Bloom, the name of the design concept for Lexington’s new high school, can accommodate the potential influx of students that the town’s new housing could bring.
“Many are interested in whether the new “Bloom” design under consideration will be large enough to accommodate the anticipated enrollment increases from known housing development,” Hackett wrote. “The short answer is yes.”
The first memo forecasts LPS’s enrollment growth in fiscal years 2026, 2027, and 2028, estimating about 100 additional high school students. The report looks at how many LPS students lived in multifamily housing from 2016 to 2024, and based on those numbers, predicts how many students could join the district by moving into five proposed new multifamily housing developments.
Currently, ten new multifamily projects are in the pipeline, including nine under the state’s MBTA Communities Act, which requires Massachusetts’ 177 municipalities served by (or bordering municipalities served by) the MBTA to encourage the development of multi-family housing near transit corridors. Lexington was one of the first Massachusetts municipalities to have its MBTA Communities Act plans approved by the state. One new project is already under construction.
Hackett’s second memo states that based on the predictions in the report, Bloom can accommodate the increased enrollment.
LHS’s current enrollment is 2,405 and Bloom will be built for a student body of 2,395, with contingency plans that allow for up to 3,238 students.
Before considering potential new students who could enroll in LPS by moving into the town’s new housing, LPS predicted LHS’s enrollment would be 2,384 in fiscal year 2028 — one year before Bloom is estimated to open.
If enrollment swells, the first thing LPS would do is increase class sizes and space utilization, which would make room for another 343 students, Hackett said. This would mean expanding class sizes to up to 25 students per class.
If more space is still needed after upping utilization, LPS would flip the 20,000 square feet of central office space already factored into Bloom’s design into 11 to 12 classrooms. That would allow for approximately 244 more students.
The last-case scenario would be to construct an addition onto the new building, which would allow for 256 more students.
Bloom would be able to accommodate 843 more students — that’s an enrollment of 3,238 — if all three of those steps are taken, according to Hackett’s second memo.
LPS then estimated how many additional students could join LHS by moving into: (1) 28 Meriam St. and 32 Edgewood Road, (2) 89 Bedford St., (3) 5, through 7 Piper Road, (4) 17 Hartwell Ave., and (5) 331 Concord Ave.
From those developments, LPS predicted that in fiscal year 2026, after construction of the new developments at (1) 28 Meriam St. and 32 Edgewood Road and (2) 89 Bedford St. is complete, up to six students could join LHS by moving into those developments.
In fiscal year 2027, after construction of the developments at (1) 5, through 7 Piper Road and (2) 17 Hartwell Ave. are complete, up to 60 students could join LHS by moving into those complexes.
And in fiscal year 2028, after construction of 331 Concord Ave. is complete, up to 31 students could join LHS by moving into that building.
All together, nearly 100 new students could enroll in LHS by moving into those five housing developments by fiscal year 2028, bringing enrollment predictions for that year up to 2,481 from 2,384.
That estimate does not include the full picture, however. It only shares how many new students could enroll in LHS by moving into five of the ten housing developments that have been proposed.
Eileen Jay, chair of the School Committee, told LexObserver those other five planned multifamily developments were not considered in the enrollment prediction because LPS could not obtain bedroom configurations for them when the report was being made.
“That made it difficult to know what year any potential impact on enrollment would be,” Jay said. “Had some of that data been available, it would have been included.”
In addition to the five developments LPS includes in its report, incoming students could also move into: (1) 231 Bedford St., (2) 217, 229, 233, and 241 Massachusetts Ave., (3) 3, 4, and 5 Militia Drive, (4) 185, 187, and 189 Bedford St., and (5) 7 Hartwell Ave. The Planning Board estimated those developments will bring 506 new dwelling units to town. And there could be more housing to come.
“The developments don’t all come online at the same time, they happen over time and we don’t know what we’re going to get from the developments, but we have some numbers now to give us some projections,” Hackett told LexObserver.
To Patrick Mehr, a Lexington resident and Select Board candidate who is opposed to the School Building Committee’s current plan for the new LHS, both Bloom and Hackett’s report are insufficient.
“It doesn’t make any sense,” he told LexObserver. “You do not build a major facility, in [this] case, Bloom, which should last us 70 years, when it’s built for 30 fewer students than we have today,” Mehr said, referencing how LHS’s current enrollment is 2,405 and Bloom is designed for 2,395.
Mehr wishes the town would commit to a phased construction of the new LHS because, he says, it is impossible to predict enrollment due to the wide-ranging implications of the MBTA Communities Act.
“The key is nobody…can predict today what Lexington’s population is going to be and [these predictions] are not good enough,” he said. “In the new world of MBTA dwellings, it’s useless because nobody has a crystal ball.”
Thank you for this summary!
Is there any consideration of the Planning Board (or appropriate authority) to limit actual new MBTA Communities Act compliant construction to the minimum area and/or new unit number required to comply with the law (even if more acreage than required was rezoned) – at least until Bloom is completed?
It is my understanding that many more acres than required to comply with the law (the MBTA Communities Act) were re-zoned to allow multi-unit dwellings.
Given the competing challenges of school enrollment prognostication while undertaking such a huge and expensive build, I am curious if there is any movement afoot to limit or at least pause actual new building (beyond the minimum required by the law) until the new HS is complete, so as to avoid finding ourselves having to build a new wing on a brand new HS at additional expense..
Also – what is the minimum area or #units that is required for Lexington to comply with the law and how well do current proposed developments already in the pipeline measure against this ‘minimum’?
While building beyond this ‘minimum’ may be justifiable and beneficial, doing so heedlessly while we try to build an appropriately sized HS may be imprudent, if we can build the current plan AND comply with the MBTA communities act..
There is a Special Town Meeting planned. https://lexingtonma.gov/2265/2025-1-Special-Town-Meeting
At public meetings, Dr. Hackett stated she did not want a high school greater than 3,000 students. This sentiment was echoed by others. Now a figure of 3,238 is being cited. And wouldn’t constructing an addition to Bloom require yet another debt exclusion override on top of the huge one required for Bloom? Don’t forget overrides for the library, E. Lexington fire station, town hall, etc. are looming in the not-too-distant future. Wow!
Well said. Couldn’t agree more. “Wow” is right! The lack of proper planning, fiscal irresponsibility and complete disregard for the enormous tax burdens that will be borne by residents is out of control.
Feels like a lot of propaganda on this issue. Like many residents, I received an email from LPS on Wednesday with the subject “Is the Bloom design large enough to accommodate known development? Yes!” What carefully chosen words. Known? Without a moratorium on MBTA development that will quickly become outdated. Also, this analysis fails to include the affordable housing development on Lowell St with 40 units with many 2 and 3 bedroom units. Very shoddy work that is low on analysis and high on PR. I expect better from this Town!
Mr. Mehr wonders why the new LHS would be built for (slightly) fewer students than attend today. I did, too, but I learned that the predicted student numbers were based on the numbers of students coming up through the early grades now, which represents a decline in the high school population by the time the new school is built. Additional students from a number of the new developments have been factored in. In addition, Mehr’s proposed staged plan would prevent LPS from unlocking the $100M+ we should receive from the state. That’s why the staged plan only received 11 votes at the town meeting – the town Capital Expenditures Committee and others critiqued many assumptions of the staged plan. https://www.yes4lex.org/cec-report The current high school was built for 1,800 and it has ~2,400 students squeezed into it now, and it’s not up to code. Letting that continue any longer than necessary is not a viable strategy.
Here’s a Helpful Resources page: https://www.yes4lex.org/helpful-resources
Fran: (I am simply “Patrick”)
One reason our elementary enrollments are down is that many parents sent their kids to private schools when Covid hit. Those kids tend to remain in their private schools until they graduate, so let’s see in 2033 (12 years after Covid hit) what happens to our enrollments — yet another factor nobody can today predict.
If the SBC had done its job right, it would have focussed — as I would do on day 1 if the voters send me to the Select Board on March 3 — on getting the MSBA (really the Governor) to accept staged designs in cases like Lexington’s where enrollments even 5 years down the road (a new school is designed to last 70 years) are impossible to predict with any accuracy, so we will not have to again wait for 8 years after Phase 1 is built to get to the front of the line of MSBA’s applicants once we know how large a Phase 2 building we need — which will depend heavily on what kinds of families (many kids, or not many, or none) live in the 1,120 as of now, possibly many more, MBTA dwellings that will soon be built in Lexington. Not to speak of “Special Residential Developments” like these https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G3x5FcRyuHDcIQVMk-ydZBZMHhmEHdaI/view?usp=sharing 15 units just applied for at 287-295 Waltham St.
The Capital Expenditures Committee failed to do its job: it took a $243 million figure which was “doodled” (in https://drive.google.com/file/d/1K2BxR0hP9-JO9Fqo5O6KuWbddNFZ_enm/view?usp=sharing) as fact re the cost of Phase 1 — which the SBC stubbornly refused to consider and professionally cost-estimate as it did for 6 designs in https://drive.google.com/file/d/1t_n7Qhc1ABALcvCl_KnusiIwiwHvZC9S/view?usp=sharing — when that $243 million “cost” is as well-founded as someone’s assertion that you should drink Lysol to be protected against Covid.
Contrary to what the SBC would want the public to believe, no code upgrade is required in the untouched buildings on the LHS campus, should one building be torn down and rebuilt larger, except for handicap accessibility which was done years ago: don’t just believe me, ask our Building Commissioner James Kelly jkelly@lexingtonma.gov, as I did to get the facts I just summarized them in this sentence. Too many people believe things without checking for their source and supporting evidence — the only way I know how to work, from my training at France’s MIT and my work at the Boston Consulting Group, both places where one neither “doodles” nor drinks Lysol.
How do you go forward with the full high school project when the number of students to be served is unknown because the number/type of units to be built due to the MBTA land set aside is unknown? What will the impact be on our property taxes as a result of the student population increase? The stakes are too high here to rely on guesswork. It would be money well spent to bring in a well qualified consulting firm (Deloitte, Boston Consulting Group) to perform an independent analysis to provide the range of students/cost to the school system for:
1. The 1200 residential units currently approved/under review
2. If the MBTA land set aside is reduced to the 50 acres required by the State
3. If the 228 acres committed to by Town Meeting remains intact
Their analysis would include the number/costs of new teachers and staff hired to accommodate the student population increase (salary, fringe benefits and pension costs), and if the existing K – 12 schools can accommodate the student population increases for each of the 3 scenarios. Will new elementary and middle schools be needed, will we need another high school? Is there available land to build additional schools?
Who exactly is looking at the long term impacts of these decisions and are they qualified to do so, and again what is the impact on our individual property taxes?
Tom:
As a former Boston Consulting Group consultant, I did the best I could (with a bill of $0 to the Town for services rendered) at https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1s_I7RFfVAdjIUpE8YOAFl7M3OA2SwF0j/edit?usp=sharing&ouid=116971253884586510151&rtpof=true&sd=true, in the form of scenarii.
I say “the best I could” because today, while the annual School budget amounts in round numbers to a full cost of $30,000 per student, I should have used a more detailed breakdown of costs, a marginal (or variable) cost, fixed costs (central administration, debt service on school buildings), in-between, or semi-variable costs — e.g. the cost of additional school buildings is $0 if only a few more students enter the system, but it is not $0 if we have 500 or 1,000 more students, requiring, at 25 students per classroom, 20 to 40 new classrooms.
Although it should, the School Administration does not today have a clear breakdown of fixed, semi-fixed and variable costs — something I would make sure, if the voters send me to the Select Board on March 3, with the Town Manager and the School Superintendent is finally known and closely tracked as I don’t see how any serious multi-year budgeting can be done without such information. And this is not a minor issue since the schools represent 80% of our $300 million annual budget (details at https://patrick4lex.org/patrickposts).
Hi Patrick,
You have our votes.
I don’t understand how the town can promote a course of action without a detailed cost breakout of said action and the potential impact to we, the tax paying residents of Lexington. Does the Town not have a Budgets & Planning Dept?
In any event, Thank you for your efforts.
Tom:
Correct, the Town does no long-range financial planning of its operating budgets beyond having a 3-year schools enrollment forecast (not used for anything financial, even though the schools are 80% of our annual $300 million expenditures) and a schedule of debt service for approved capital projects (which is straightforward, as you or I get from our mortgage company telling us, if our interest rate is fixed, how much we will owe annually on our existing mortgage until it is extinguished).
Nothing beyond that, incredibly. That’s why I am running for Select Board: without any long-term financial analyses and planning BEFORE making any major decision (e.g. Bloom or some other design for our new High School? 228 acres for MBTA developments or 50? etc) is suicidal. We may destroy the quality of our schools 5, 10 or 15 years down the road due to a bad decision made today, something we don’t even realize now may/will happen because we did no long-range planning and analyses.
Please invite your Lexington friends and neighbors to subscribe to my short PatrickPost emails on https://patrick4lex.org/patrickposts, which will provide further details on these important issues.
Governor Healey just signed a bill providing by-right accessory apartment development state wide.
Lexington has opened the door to doubling its housing with the generously applied MBTA communities act. Lexington has also taken other steps to expand housing.
The school committee master planning is “after the fact” just as it was when the preschool was proposed years ago.
Master planning should precede construction.
Master planning should tell us when the 7th elementary and 3rd middle school would be built.
Master planning should define when two high schools would be used instead of one.
Master planning should drive site design considerations – such as how many students will be using the Worthen Road site in the future.
What is the site’s maximum capacity, rather than the school’s maximum capacity.
We need a change.
Thank you Mark, I agree. I hope that people are paying attention to the Special Town Meeting and upcoming election. It will be critical to decide what our town looks like in the future and how we are able to support our residents.