Regarding the high school project, the outcome of the current legal challenge to Bloom is irrelevant to the choices the town is facing. Bloom cannot be built because the town has feasible alternatives to building on park and playground. We will not be granted Article 97 relief by the EEA.
My purpose in speaking is to point out to you—and to parents—that even at this late date, this is not a crisis. The town can build a completely new school on the current campus that relieves overcrowding as quickly as Bloom would—by the fall of 2029—and that will not interfere with students’ education during construction.
How do I know? Because the architects told us so.
On April 29 of last year, they presented a phased-in-place design for a school that would avoid Article 97 land entirely, that would be so student-friendly that it would not even require temporary modular classrooms, and that would relieve overcrowding a year faster than Bloom would. A School Building Committee member pointed out that the town would not be able to win Article 97 relief unless it fully explored this proposal.
Yet the Building Committee declined even to discuss it.
And so the committee put the architects in a bind. A video on the school project website describes their obligations under Article 97, except for the most important one. There is no mention at all of their obligation to submit what is called an alternatives analysis, that claims that the only feasible place to put a school is on the fields. The architects have been given an impossible task. They cannot hide their own proposal, their reasoning behind it, or their enthusiasm for it.
Invite Lorraine Finnegan to your next meeting. She can describe the ways her team will design a new phased-in-place school that you, parents and a majority of the voters of Lexington will be delighted to support.
First of all, there isn’t any record of a School Building Committee meeting on April 29, 2024. There was a meeting on April 28, 2024, but I’m not sure if that’s the meeting Williams is referring to. That may seem like a trivial correction, but there have been hundreds of public meetings on this project, and it’s tricky to talk about the same information if you don’t have the right date.
Since there wasn’t a meeting on the date Williams mentioned, I looked for meetings on the “phased in place” idea, and found this February 19, 2025 memo from the MSBA to Lexington, which describes the *19* different options the School Building Committee reviewed, including four different Addition/Renovation options (Option B.1, B.2,B.3, B.4). They all priced out to at least $60 million more than Bloom.
You can read the February 19 memo yourself.
https://massschoolbuildings.org/sites/default/files/edit-contentfiles/About_Us/Board_Meetings/2025_Board/2.26.2025/Lexington_PS_Memo.pdf
Town Counsel mentioned that Jim Williams as a party to the letter about the 1914 deed restriction. The Town was released from that deed restriction in 1961. I question whether Williams’ legal judgement about Article 97 in this case is similarly mistaken. Lexington doesn’t have any realistic alternatives to Bloom that won’t cost Lexington taxpayers substantially more money for a worse school.
I’d love to think that there was a cheaper, faster way to make our school safe and functional than the Bloom design. But three years into this project, I don’t think that Prince Charming school exists. Instead of telling fairy tales, I hope that we can all make real choices to support our students, our teachers, and our staff and vote for the Debt Exclusion on December 8.
Meg:
You are still being very impolite — your and my neighbor is not “Williams”, as I am not “Mehr”, he is Jim, and I am Patrick. Arguing about issues is fine and desirable, but insulting fellow Lexingtonians is not — as Marge Battin or Deborah Brown repeatedly remind Town Meeting members. You must be a poor student…
Especially so, since your research skills need improvement: there WAS an April 29, 2024 “School Building Committee Coordination Meeting”. Its minutes are at https://docs.google.com/document/d/1pi6W4CSGDMp9_kfZxwqtkdrMXPOIRM5zk6F7kr2r-f4/edit?tab=t.0 found by scrolling down afdter clicking on “VIEW MEETING DOCUMENTS” on https://www.lhsproject.lexingtonma.org/school-building-committee.
Your inability to find those minutes confirms what I have also experienced (and I am a good student, since I only assert things I can provide citations for): I asked Kathleen for the supporting document(s) based on which the SBC’s recent video asserts that it would cost “$311 million over 10 years”, and Kathleen sent me to https://www.lhsproject.lexingtonma.org/school-building-committee, an unfriendly way to not answer. So I took the next step, and files a Public Records Request, the answer to which is due soon.
Once you realize that there was an April 29, 2024 “School Building Committee Coordination Meeting”, in its minutes read what Alan Levine said, and you will — finally — understand what Jim told the Select Board.
Hope this helps you become a better student — of form, and of facts.
Meg:
How do you know that there is no “cheaper, faster way to make our school safe and functional than the Bloom design”?
I oppose spending $660 million on Bloom because it can accommodate fewer students than we have now (2,400), while our population may grow by 30% in a decade and because the SBC never studied a true 2-phase design — Phase 1 being a multi-story “box” replacing the LHS foreign languages building, and Phase 2 sized to allow the new LHS, once both phases are completed, to accommodate up to 4,200 students.
I am not a construction expert, but the Phase 1 “box” would be cheaper per sq ft than the curved Bloom, and can be built faster than Bloom, helping relieve LHS’s overcrowding sooner than Bloom can.
So again, on what evidence do you base your assertion that there is no “cheaper, faster way to make our school safe and functional than the Bloom design”?