AMHERST — Voters on Nov. 8 may decide whether the town should move forward with constructing two new elementary schools at the Wildwood School site.
The Select Board on Monday is expected to determine whether to set Nov. 8 as the date for a Proposition 2½ debt-exclusion vote for the $65 million project, which needs majority support to pass.
If the vote occurs on election day, that would mean voters weighing in on the project before borrowing is considered by Town Meeting, which requires which reqires support from at least two-thirds of members for approval.
Peter Hechenbleikner, interim town manager, said other communities often go to voters first seeking to raise taxes over the Proposition 2½ limit, before the legislative body acts. “It wouldn’t be unusual,” he added.
But he acknowledged that this is not the typical way votes have been done in Amherst. In most cases, Town Meeting has voted in advance of townwide Proposition 2½ overrides.
The Select Board on Monday could also set the dates for fall Town Meeting. The tentative start date is Nov. 14.
Projections of costs for the building project show that it would receive about $34 million from the Massachusetts School Building Authority, with the town paying more than $30 million.
The plan is to co-locate two, 375-student schools in one building at the Wildwood School site on Strong Street, with each housing students in Grades 2 through 6.
Wildwood and Fort River, which are each more than 40 years old, have issues with the open-classroom configurations called quads, which the school administration has said leads to distracted students and undesirable education environments. That got Wildwood accepted into the state’s school infrastructure needs program after several applications.
The current plans is to build in two phases, with the first ready for occupancy in fall 2019, and the second to open in fall 2020.
Douglas Roberts, managing director of JCJ Architecture in Boston, said a two-story building, with 122,000 square feet, would be done first.
“Once phase one is completed in the fall of 2019, the school will be occupied by the existing Wildwood students, then the existing building will be razed, the site will be complete, and phase two will be completed,” Roberts said.
Each school will have its own playing fields and playground. They will share a cafeteria and gym, but the students in the separate schools would not interact during the course of the school day.
In fall 2020, Fort River School students would move from South East Street to the new site, and Crocker Farm Elementary School on West Street, at that time, would become a pre-school through first grade building.
School officials will submit project plans and cost estimates to the school building authority at the end of July. Once the MSBA approves the scope of the project, the town will have 120 days to approve spending, said assistant superintendent Michael Morris, who is chairman of the School Building Committee.
The school project is one of four major building projects the town is considering. The others are an expansion and renovation of the Jones Library, a new Department of Public Works headquarters and a fire station for South Amherst.
Competing groups representing parents, teachers, staff and community members have formed to support and oppose the school project. The one supporting is known as Building Opportunity for Learning and Diversity, or BOLD.
Elizabeth Larson, a parent of a Fort River child, recently informed the Select Board of its advocacy.
“We now feel that we need to stand up and let the other members of our community here in Amherst know that we cannot miss this opportunity to build a new building for schools that really reflect our community values of education, environmental sustainability and equality for all of our kids,” Larson said.
Concern about the project is expressed by Save Amherst’s Small Schools, or SASS, which has advocated against the idea of having two schools on one site, criticizing it as the “mega school” and the possibility the town would lose its neighborhood schools.
At annual Town Meeting, the group requested $40,000 from free cash to study renovating both Wildwood and Fort River. That was rejected.
Scott Merzbach can be reached at smerzbach@gazettenet.com.
