School Committee Vote on Enrollment Number; Traffic Study

On Monday, December 14th, the School Committee by a 4-1 vote approved a total enrollment number of 700 for the new Bancroft School. This number reflects 620 K-5 students and 80 Pre-K students. Members voting in the majority felt that educationally, 700 was a number they were comfortable with; in terms of impact to the site, the majority expressed a desire to have the Feasibility Study process determine whether the site and neighborhood can accommodate a building with that number of students.

Going forward, it is important to note the following:

(1) The School Building Committee is now charged with determining what impact a building of 700 students will have on educational design options, on the environment, on traffic patterns, on infrastucture, and on the integrity of the surrounding neighborhood. If the impact is not acceptable, the enrollment number will have to be revisited by the School Committee. Therefore, it is very important that neighbors and abutters continue to engage in the Feasibility Study along with the Building Committee. We encourage you to “push back” at each step of the process so that every potential impact to the neighborhood is fully explored and understood.

(2) The School Committee enrollment decision does not make any of the three potential building locations--in front of the existing school, behind the existing school, and on top of the existing footprint--any more or less likely at this point.

Traffic Study

The firm that is performing our traffic analysis (Bryant Associates, www.bryant-engrs.com) has already begun collecting data; you may have seen some of their wires installed across Bancroft and Holt Roads. However, the Building Committee has not yet voted on the full scope of the traffic study because we are not yet satisfied that it covers everything we would like it to cover. To this end, at our next meeting on Wednesday morning, December 23rd (8:00 am, Selectmen's Room on the third floor of Town Offices), a representative from Bryant Associates will be in attendance so that we can talk through all the idiosyncracies of the various streets in the neighborhood, sight lines, traffic patterns, concerns about vehicle turning radius, seasonal concerns, weekend vs. weekday concerns, etc. It is very important that we feel certain that the scope of the traffic analysis is exhaustive, so we strongly encourage residents to attend to help inform this process. We will have a large map there to refer to. We also plan to schedule at least one additional meeting with Bryant Associates at another time to be determined.

School Committee Meeting Postponed to Monday, December 14th

The School Committee Meeting originally scheduled for Thursday, December 10th has been postponed to Monday, December 14th at 7:00 pm in the School Committee room, 36R Bartlet Street (second floor above the Senior Center). The agenda will remain the same as noted in the previous post below. Hope you can attend.

School Committee Meeting on Thursday, December 10th

The next School Committee meeting will be held on Thursday, December 10th beginning at 7:00 pm in the School Committee room (36R Bartlet Street, second floor above the Senior Center). The Bancroft Feasibility Study is scheduled to come up roughly midway through the agenda, around 8:30, but it is almost impossible to project exact times. The meeting agenda can be viewed by copying and pasting this link into your browser:

http://www.aps1.net/Archive.aspx?AMID=36&Type=Recent

It is our goal to vote on an enrollment number for the new Bancroft at this meeting. However, this should not be viewed as a final decision. Whatever enrollment number is voted upon can ultimately be revised pending the results of the ongoing Feasibility Study analysis. So, if the traffic study, geotechnical analysis, site survey, etc show us that the enrollment number we choose will compromise the safety or integrity of the surrounding neighborhood, we will be able to revise the size of the school accordingly.

Options we will consider on Thursday include:

1. Keeping Bancroft at 500--and alleviating the overcrowding at Shawsheen in other ways, such as through minor redistricting and/or capping enrollment at Shawsheen
2. Expanding the Bancroft K-5 population to between 600 and 700 students and including the Pre-K at Bancroft as well; closing Shawsheen
3. Expanding the Bancroft K-5 population to between 600 and 700 students and housing the Pre-K elsewhere (e.g. move it to Sanborn or keep it running at Shawsheen). This would eliminate the K-2 programming at Shawsheen, and potentially eliminate the Pre-K at Shawsheen as well.

We hope to see you at the meeting.