Although Wellesley’s new Hardy Elementary School has been open for just a little over a year, it’s already time for a tweak. Ever hear the adage, “Where there’s a rolling ball, there’s a running child”? So has the school’s principal Grant Smith, who voiced his concerns about how errant balls have sailed over the 4-ft. high chain link fence separating the playing field from busy Weston Road. Brown, along with assistant Town engineer George Saraceno, appeared before Wellesley’s Design Review Board on Oct. 8, seeking approval to add five feet of netting to the existing fence.
You know how when stuff happens, people sometimes ask in despair, “How did we get here?”
Nobody asked that at the Design Review Board meeting. The 5-member Board saw this one coming a mile away. “We knew this was going to come up,” chair Juann Khoory said, recalling that the Board raised exactly the question of balls escaping from the playing field to busy Weston Road during the Hardy School planning process.
Saraceno laid out the specifics of the ask: to add 200 feet of netting along Weston Road; 40 feet of netting along Hardy Road; and 40 feet of netting along the parking lot. The overall height would come in at 9 feet. Saraceno compared it visually to the netting at Sprague School, albeit on a smaller scale—at Sprague, the netting height is 20 feet because kids up to high school age play there.
The Board unanimously approved the addition of the netting, without even a, “We told ya so.”
“Good luck with the fence. The project looks amazing. We love it,” Khoory said.
Please send tips, photos, ideas to theswellesleyreport@gmail.com
Subscribe to Swellesley’s weekday email newsletter.
it is disgusting how they are destroying our neighborhood with this unsightly mess of netting. They should have been more mindful of this issue when they set up the site originally and worked with the neighborhood to arrive at a solution that was more attractive and less invasive to our community. there is no reason why the school could not find a more suitable solution and screen the play ground with evergreens to hide the already unattractive chain link fence. It looks like a roadside truck stop on I-95. If I wanted to live in an urban jungle, I would have not moved to Wellesley in the first place.