At the September 8th Wellesley Board of Selectmen (BOS) meeting, BOS member Tom Ulfelder reported on the topic of the School Building Committee (SBC)’s task to determine on which site a new elementary school should be located — at Upham or at Hardy. Ulfelder serves as the BOS liaison to the SBC.
Each of those elementary schools is under under consideration for a teardown/rebuild scenario. The site on which a new Hardy or Upham school will be built is as yet undetermined. The stakes are high, because one school’s rebuild will mean the other school’s closure as Wellesley moves from seven kindergarten – grade 5 elementary schools to a six-school model.
The School Committee says it will retain ownership of the closed school.
Pre-COVID, the timeline was for a schematic design for each site to be presented in May 2020 by Compass Project Management, the contracting firm tasked with the project. Last spring, the SBC reached a consensus to take a 3-month pause on Hardy/Upham Project work due to scheduling disruptions brought about by COVID.
That 3-month pause has ended.
BOS member Ulfelder said an issue that has come up regarding the Upham site has been “an effort to determine if you can locate an adequate facility on that lot and minimize the amount of ledge that would have to be removed and the tree canopy that would have to come down.”
The Upham site includes over five acres of woods, most of which would have to be cut down to make way for a new school, and over 20 feet of rock ledge, which would have to be blasted.
Some in town have questioned whether Hardy, Wellesley’s most racially diverse school, should be closed, while others cite traffic concerns, saying that a Hardy plan will increase the carload on an already busy Weston Road.
At two upcoming meetings, the SBC will be considering the options and ramifications of both sites as presented by the project’s designer. “A request was made to the designer to come up with enough information to bring this to a conclusion,” Ulfelder said. “The Thursday and Friday meetings are important as we move toward out current track of a Sept 24th decision” on where the new school will be sited.
Important dates:
School Building Committee meeting: Thursday, Sept. 10, 5:30pm
See the agenda
Please email the SBC for a Zoom link to participate in public comment: [email protected]
The meeting will be live streamed via Wellesley Public Media
School Building Committee meeting: Friday, Sept, 11, 5pm
See the agenda
Please email the SBC for a Zoom link to participate in public comment: [email protected]
The meeting will be live streamed via Wellesley Public Media
Date not yet confirmed: Sept 24, SBC decision on new school site
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The most important issue, which is failed to be cited in this article, is student safety. If Hardy is rebuilt, over 1400 families will need to cross Route 9 to attend elementary school. Forget about walking and biking to school. If Upham is rebuilt, only about 40 families will need to cross 9. The fewer children needing to cross Route 9, the better. Perhaps not as important, but still important if town wants to get residents financially supporting this initiative: it’s also cheaper to rebuild Upham. Seems like a pretty obvious choice here.
How are your numbers accurate? We had 2094 students in elementary schools in 2019/20. Many households have more than one child. At the very least it is approx 1050 households if everyone has one child., my guess is it is much less that than 1050 households. Also building Upham is definitely not cheaper than Hardy. That being said many families have traveled to school on Rt9 for years, are Upham kids more valuable than the rest of our kids? Build a school for families that actually use public schools.
From the far reaches of Precinct D, I offer a disinterested observation.
Population density suggests that more kids are within walking distance of Hardy. As for traffic on Weston Rd., we should note that only the several minutes on each side of school opening and closing are impacted. Or, extending Hickory Rd. into the rear of Hardy land could, with appropriate signage, take the pickup/drop off traffic from Weston Rd.