Amid calls for urgency in deciding the future of the Winter Hill Community Innovation School and Benjamin G. Brown School, members of Somerville’s newly formed Construction Advisory group are being careful to not cut corners.
The group, which met for the second time Tuesday, is tasked with presenting a recommendation for the scope and location of a new or renovated school paid for by a state grant. They must finalize the recommendation to mayor Katjana Ballantyne by November 2025, per a Massachusetts School Building Authority timeline, but at last month’s first meeting, members wondered if they could speed up the process.
Megan Brady, an eighth grade civics teacher at the Winter Hill school, was the only person to stand up during public comment at the previous meeting Oct. 8, encouraging the group to defer to the work of her students: data collected the previous school year from surveying 602 community members on their desires for a new school. Brady was invited back to speak to the group Tuesday.
“Schools are about children and about caring for children,” she said, reminding the group to not get caught up in the bureaucracy of the process. “We have known our school needed desperate help for a very long time. We feel like there is no end to this tunnel because we don’t know what is happening, and that is not good.”
Frustration has mounted among those affected by the closing of the Winter Hill school over safety concerns in June 2023. In spring of this year, parents said they wished Ballantyne would just make a decision rather than draw out an already long process; the mayor is steadfast in insisting on input from the community.
Noting that her students had been moved between four school locations within the past four years, Brady told the group, “There is an immense urgency to fix this. You all have 12 months, you all are adults. High bar.”
While members of the advisory group agree time is of the essence, they expressed concern with the timeline presented by Stacie Nicole Smith of the Consensus Building Institute, who is charged with leading the group through the process.
Members were presented with a conceptual draft for a survey to be presented to the public that Smith proposed would be distributed as soon as Monday and be available until the first week of January. Matthew Daniels, a Winter Hill parent representative, took issue with the timeline, as it ran through the holiday season. Members also raised concerns over the language in the survey being too vague and excluding the perspective of neurodivergent families.
Smith proposed that they skip the next meeting in December and instead convene in January, allowing her to make edits to the survey, but that was met with pushback. “It sounds like it is more than a bit of refining,” said Daniels, recommending that they meet in December as planned to discuss the community engagement survey as a group.
While CBI was hired to mediate the group, it has been more involved than some expected.
“The proposed survey guidelines from CBI were really inadequate, and it was disappointing that we weren’t given sufficient time to review these,” said Daniels, referring to the Tuesday meeting. “I would like to see CBI take a more facilitation role rather than leading the actual process so that it is truly community guided.”
Former president of the Winter Hill parent-teacher association Uma Murugan was the sole public commenter. “I would want anyone who takes the survey to know that there’s a tremendous sense of urgency in getting the new replacement building built, finished and open. Our needs as a community need to be centered before they weigh in with their values,” she said.
Like Murugan, group members worried that the community does not have enough of an understanding yet to weigh in. “I’ve met a lot of parents who don’t even know that Winter Hill is closed,” Daniels said.
Due to a lack of spaces to meet, the committee will convene remotely next month, via Zoom videoconferencing software, to allow members to be a part of the survey revision process. In the meantime, members plan to compile a list of documents for CBI to get from the city before the next meeting, so they can be better prepared.
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