The Observer indicates that of the four people running for the Select Board, two candidates are squarely for the Bloom Plan, while a third’s position is not yet clear. Only one is sounding a warning about it, a concern I find myself sharing.
Patrick Mehr’s position is that the Bloom plan for a new Lexington High School (LHS) will not even meet the town’s future enrollment needs while increasing taxation beyond what many can afford and destroying the contiguity of Lexington’s beloved sports fields. I have read that the Bloom plan is designed for 2,395 students, fewer than the 2,405 students presently attending LHS. And yet “Bloom” is supposed to serve Lexington for the next half-century or more, even as student population is projected to increase significantly.
No one knows how many additional students LHS will enroll a few years from now, as new MBTA-prescribed, low-cost dwellings that will house many new Lexington residents become available. Lexington has provided 228.2 acres for development of such housing—over four times the Commonwealth’s expectation. Even if only a third of this acreage is developed into housing, the number of new students this could represent would overwhelm the new Bloom Plan LHS.
Still, the Lexington School Board Committee (the SBC) wants to move ahead with the Bloom plan without ever doing a cost estimate of the town’s 2015 Master Plan for a new high school, a plan which recommended a staged design. That plan’s Phase 1 called for replacing the current LHS foreign languages building with a multi-story academic classroom complex. Further phases would be employed to upgrade other parts of the campus as needed. This staged plan would accommodate a large influx of new students. This is the plan Mr. Mehr argues for.
I was once the director of the Houston Teachers Institute (HTI), helping teachers in Houston’s inner-city schools. From repeated visits to many high schools, I saw that a school’s leadership and the presence of many excellent teachers was what made for an excellent school—and it was the absence of such people that made a school a failure; the state of the plant did not have that much to do with it.
At the same time, I undertook a study of great teachers, learning of one Mark Hopkins in an account of the education of President James Garfield. When Garfield was a college student in the 1850s, Hopkins was his teacher. Garfield later said of Hopkins, “The ideal college is Mark Hopkins on one end of a log with a student on the other.” What Garfield said about a college education applies equally to secondary school learning.
Years after Garfield, W.E.B. Du Bois wrote of Mark Hopkins, too: “There was a time when the American people believed pretty devoutly that a log of wood with a boy at one end and Mark Hopkins at the other, represented the highest ideal of human training. But in these eager days, it would seem that we have changed all that and think it necessary to add a couple of saw-mills…to this…and, at a pinch, to dispense with the services of Mark Hopkins.” I fear the allure of new building complexes such as Concord, Belmont, Waltham and Arlington may be prompting Lexington to the embellishment of “the log” to the tune of severe fiscal immoderation.
Waltham’s High School cost about $300 million in 2021-24 and Arlington’s cost $240 million in 2019-25. Both new schools are about 400,000 square feet in size, versus Bloom’s slightly larger 440,000 square feet. At the same time, both of these high schools offer 23-26% more space per student than the Bloom plan will provide in Lexington. But at $650 million, the Bloom Plan will dwarf the costs of building these other schools.
I’ve found Patrick Mehr to be the sole candidate for Select Board who understands that the Bloom Plan is not what’s required to make LHS a school of surpassing excellence. I agree with him that going with that plan should not be the direction taken by our town.