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Hey, remember when the school superintendent said West Roxbury High was in such bad shape she had to shut it nearly immediately so it wouldn't collapse on people's heads?
By adamg on Fri, 05/05/2023 - 9:45pm
Yeah, fun times.
About that. This week, Mayor Wu said the problems can be buffed right out and the school re-opened as a new high school.
It's the latest example of Boston officials running around like chickens with their heads cut off when it comes to schools, then putting their heads back on and going: Eh.
Like when BPS shut the Agassiz School in Jamaica Plain, in large part because it was dangerously full of mold, but then they figured out how to remediate that and re-open the building for two schools. Or the time BPS shut Hyde Park High School only it had to promptly find a way to re-open it when the state threatened to take back the $36 million it had given BPS a couple years earlier to upgrade the building.
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Comments
Spin the wheel again
So which school is going to be closed in order to move its kids to the WREC?
Unlike bordering towns Brookline and Newton, Boston doesn't need to increase the number of public school seats, it needs to reduce them. If they're going to reopen the WREC because it's such a gorgeous location*, then they need to identify another currently open school, or schools, that they're going to close.
Once they do that, we get a whole new circus of despair, which I will be amused to watch.
*ass-end of nowhere, hard to get to by public transit, where kids get run over crossing the parkway
That part
Why does an urban school district own a property that is in the middle of nowhere, not near transit, and too far from hospitals/universities/museums for internships and collaborations?
And they park buses on pricy walkable in-city lots.
Why not use the WREC for things like training and facilities workshops/storage, park buses on its land, and build walkable schools on the current bus lots?
Right?! The Dorchester bus
Right?! The Dorchester bus lot and service center could totally be redeveloped as a school campus. It is near the Redline and the 18 Bus stops right out front.
Buffed right out
I’m assuming you’ve never step foot in the building. I spent 4 years there. And it was a dump during those 4 years, which was about 20 years ago.
I'm assuming you're
I'm assuming you're unfamiliar with the concept of sarcasm.
GC Wu and inspector Adam
Looks like there more to be done than a quick clean.
Here are the building documents associated with the building.
https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/Page/7427
This is the 3rd party report from 2014.
https://www.bostonpublicschools.org/cms/lib/MA01906464/Centricity/Domain...
With inflation and continued neglect, there probably $20-$30m of repairs in order.
You can't be surprised, I
You can't be surprised, I often confuse BPS with the Benny Hill show.
The slow march to state
The slow march to state takeover continues apace.
Capital Budget
Just an FYI, the capital budget actually states they're looking at a full demo and rebuild. Don't know if there was a mixup there.
content.boston.gov/sites/default/files/file/2023/04/FY24%20Full%20Budget%20Document.pdf#page=529
It’s BPS
Do you expect effective communication? See busing, school closures, school lockdowns, ect.
Thanks for the laugh
At first I thought that said they're going to demolish the current building and rebuild a comprehensive 7-12 school for 18.5M.
But no, 18.5 million is what they intend to spend on the design study. Just in 2024.
Sounds like they're going to breed a prize white elephant.
Waltham's new high school cost around 375M. I'm sure we can beat that. Only the best for a school the city doesn't need, in a terrible location, that will close again five years later.
Wu has really stepped in it this time.
Isn't it a perfect location for a school?
Busing aside, that is the perfect place for a large school. Fields, fresh air, parking, away from neighbors?
edit: I guess the other side of the VFW isn't perfect but maybe someday the MBTA will need to fix that bridge and put up some walking/biking lanes. Hell Brookline just did a 200 million+ project on a 9th grade building that had the MBTA do all sorts of things for them.
Perfect location?
Usually a location is considered good when it's convenient to something else. This site has going for it only that it's large, and mostly empty, except for the building they'll have to tear down.
That's really all it has going for it - space. It's between a swamp and a landfill and a cemetery, near just about nothing.
A good location for a school would be near where the students live. Or at least easy to get to from where the students live.
If there's a useful concession that could be made for this school in terms of transit, it would be opening a commuter rail stop right next to it, on the train tracks that are right there already. But I wouldn't hold your breath.
Better than
The landfill that it used to be.
High Schools don't really need that though do they?
I mean busing throws this whole conversation off, but since everything is built up already, West Roxbury is limited as to where they can put a school. Sure it would have been perfect if the City had that Roxbury Latin property before they bought it to put a HS, but now you are limited in where you can put a nice HS.
Almost every suburban HS I can think of is next to large fields for sports/recreation and parking lots (Needham and Brookline are the only ones I can think of that aren't). And if we aren't talking about busing, then WR is a "suburban" HS.
There’s a parcel zoned educational on Belgrade
Right by the Westie parkway. On bus and commuter rails lines. The city could put a high school there.
Weird it hasn’t been suggested before.
If kids are wasting 2 hours a day in transit sure…
That’s a great place (with no sports fields or green space of course)
There is no “busing” for high
There is no “busing” for high school students in Boston. All high schools (except the precious exams schools) are open lottery and the kids have to get there themselves. This school would serve kids from all over. Having a school that is difficult to get to, especially for families that can’t drive is asinine.
I am not even going to touch how fiscally and environmentally irresponsible this is.
Suburban high school?
The WREC (suggested sports team mascot: white elephant) would not be a suburban high school, because it would not be located in a suburb and it would not have suburban students.
Here's a link to the Newton North bus schedule:
https://www.newton.k12.ma.us/site/handlers/filedownload.ashx?moduleinsta...
It has eleven different routes, which fan out through the Newton North catchment, which is about 9 square miles (half of Newton's 18 sqm).
Cool idea, right? Every kid on the street who goes to a public high school can get on the same bus, to the same school.
We don't have to wait to see the bus schedule for a new high school at the WREC, because there will be no buses for the kids converging there from the 49 square miles of Boston.
So, no, suburban high schools like you're talking about don't need ease of access, because they can set up a school bus network that covers their entire catchment, but urban, city-wide high schools that won't have such a network really should be easy to get to.
I should have rephrased
I said busing throws this whole conversation off, but it’s the concept of not keeping local schools local that’s the issue. WR is more suburban than Brookline, and of .you kept the same concept of just going to the closest school in your neighborhood, then I believe my point stands. Schools should simply be the same in each municipality. WR high should have the same resources Charlestown has. the closest 1,500 kids who live near WR (or went to the x amount of elementary schools in/near WR) simply go to WR High. would you need buses? Maybe one or two. Or do what Brookline did and give them a pass for the 51 (or green line).
So again, the concept of busing (or making sure schools are integrated) is the issue.
That ship sailed decades ago
Boston has no local schools to keep local. Your point was always about a hypothetical world that doesn't exist. And you have the bus question exactly backwards: a bus network would work better, not worse, in a local school regime.
It seems the game is changing though
First it was desegregation, then busing, then filling open spaces, then protecting the exam schools, now it’s “let’s keep an eye on the racial numbers and see what we can get away with”. WR used to have 20? 40? Buses going in there very day. The year it closed they still had 2-3 (I saw them). So how does that make them different than Newton North? Longer bus rides I presume.
Wu is gonna have a lot of leeway in terms of what she can get away with here. But it is still a better location imo than Belgrade and the parkway.
Wu does not seem to realize
Wu does not seem to realize we are on the precipice of a recession and a collapse of commercial property values (ie. property tax revenues)? The money train is going to stop and Wu will be on to higher office by then and all of us residents are going to be holding the bag.
There should be an award given out every year
For most dysfunctional system. MBTA and BPS would battle it out every year. What a joke.
If only we gave both organizations more money things like this wouldn’t happen! /s
36 Bus
Doesn’t the chronically late 36 bus go somewhere up in there?
It did
They extended its route from, I think, the VA Hospital to Millennium Park/the school baseball fields, at least for alternate buses, but the T's most recent bus-change plans called for unextending it because there's just not much call for a bus that goes to a school that was closed in 2018.
Correct
Under the proposed Bus Network Redesign, the 36 will become a high-frequency bus route running to the VA Hospital and Dedham Mall; the Route 36 extension to Millennium Park and Rivermoor Industrial Area will be eliminated, as well as the Route 37 Baker & Vermont bus which stops about 1/4 mile away from the (former) school.
36 Bus
Select routes go to a stop at the entrance to Millennium Park. A lot of kids would take that and walk up a path to the ballfield and from there to the school building. In fact the field is still used for some sporting events and that si how some people get there.
However the MBTA's Better Bus Plan will stop buses from going there and instead go up VFW Parkway to the Dedham Mall.
So it was hard to get there before (and now) and that will end with little fanfare when they finally make the planned route changes that the MBTA Board already approved.
So unless you take a Yellow School bus there, of which there were few before, and of which there are less these days forcing high school kids on the MBTA, well, there will be no way to get there unless mom or dad chauffer you there each morning.
Point of order. When talking
Point of order. When talking about MBTA service it's not necessarily to specify "chronically late", we assume so unless otherwise specified.
Jackson Mann
So what does this mean for the Jackson Mann in Allston?
Same contractor, same design, same era, same problems.
Will this become the permanent home for the Horace Mann School for the Deaf and All/Bri's Community Center
Will also be torn down
The Jackson Mann will also be torn down. The city is dithering about whether, when, and what they're going to build again on the site.
https://www.nbcboston.com/multimedia/a-tale-of-two-schools-bps-and-the-j...
And no, it makes no sense whatsoever to put the Allston/Brighton Community Center way the heck out at the end of West Roxbury
WTF?
Granted I've only lived in Boston for 23 years, but this is the worst decision I've seen by city government. That is truly saying something. This is a sign of incompetence, not poor judgement. I really want to see how she justifies this.
Is this her justification for the purchase of electric school buses which don't exist to send kids to school at the edge of town so she can sell the BLS property to the hospitals?
This is her hometown Chicago kind of stupid.
Stupid
First, Chicago made the painful but necessary move to rationalize their schools and shut down a bunch of half-empty buildings a decade ago. Second, don’t know what you’re whining about, I’ve seen multiple electric buses running around. You can have a pass on understanding Chicago, but if you haven’t seen the electric buses and you think this is the dumbest decision, you should get out more.