Our town must make a big decision in the vote scheduled for Monday, December 8th. I write to describe what’s at stake.
A formal entryway of the present Lexington High School is at one end of Muzzey Street; at the other end of Muzzey is a matching entryway to the Lexington Rail Depot—now a museum in the heart of the Lexington dedicated to telling the town’s history. The town center and the high school thus stand directly opposite one another with a unique architectural link connecting the young people of the town with its historic, public heart. The present Lexington High also stands on very firm ground—firmer than the playing fields pertaining to the school just to its north on which the controversial Bloom Plan for a new LHS is to be built.
The Bloom Plan, requiring overriding the debt limitation instituted years ago to curb inordinate borrowing, will do away with the entryway presently pairing the school with the heart of downtown Lexington. It will plant the school literally on a bog that is sixty feet deep over which the football field now stands. It’s designed just for 2,400 students and thus will not meet enrollment projected to be well over 3,000 in a decade.
The Bloom Plan, to be financed by an override allowing the town to borrow an enormous sum to meet the projected $660 million cost, will fiscally imperil single-family, tax-paying, homeowners of Lexington for decades to come, and the plan’s ultimate cost may exceed this sum far more than anyone wants to admit.
Lexington needs a new high school, but a better plan is available—a two-staged design on the present school site described in Lexington’s 2015 Master Plan for a new LHS. That plan recommended such a staged approach. Its first stage would replace the current LHS foreign languages building with a classroom complex several stories high. Following phases would build on the present site to accommodate a future enrollment of up to 3,500.
We are called to approve a debt override to pay for a plan designed for too few students, to be built on problematic ground, and which will obliterate the historic connection the present school site has with Lexington’s downtown.
I respectfully urge voters on December 8th to vote NO on the debt exclusion proposal for Bloom.
Paul Cooke
That plan was considered. Thrive’s initial cost was estimated at $297.7M with the next phase of construction costing $552.9M for a total of $850M, nearly $200M more than Bloom. The SBC cited many issues with this plan including overall impact to student and educational activities, displacement of existing parking and arrival and dismissal driveways, and the need to relocate those to the existing playing fields during construction. Project timeline would also extend out to 2035. The MSBA has never supported a phased construction project, so this choice would also have likely lost $121M in state support. This plan was soundly rejected by the SBC.