Suburbs get funding for new schools, while New Bedford waits … and waits

The auditorium in the 1922-built Carlos Pacheco Elementary School in New Bedford can no longer be used as an auditorium.

It's been subdivided into cubicles so teachers can do classroom preparation there. When the cubicles are full, you can hear the hum of teachers talking as there are no roofs over the dividers to keep the noise down. Even with the auditorium having been converted, there is still another class prep area at Pacheco located right in the middle of the first-floor hallway, copying machine and all.

The Pacheco cafeteria is in the basement, but they don't cook there. They don't have cooking facilities. They bring in hot trays from the central prep kitchen that serves all of the 100-plus-year-old schools in New Bedford.

In the computer room at Pacheco, the technology and media specialist only uses the computers on one side of the room. There are no power outlets or wiring for the other three sides. There is no air-conditioning to keep the server cool, just fans.

Students in every single room at Pacheco can't look out a window and see the outside world. That's because only hazy light filters into Pacheco through plastic, opaque windows that were installed throughout the New Bedford school system in the 1990s, at least partially as a public safety measure.

To say it's a challenging learning environment at the 100-plus-year-old elementary school is an understatement.

Andrew O’Leary, the New Bedford district's assistant superintendent for finance and operations, says students get very excited when something is upgraded at a school like Pacheco.

"The working conditions and the learning conditions, the students pick up on that very, very quickly."

Pacheco Principal Nicole Brine said that the school has everything it needs, just not in an optimum learning environment.

"Students would be better served in spaces that had roofs, actual classrooms, classroom spaces with electricity and the things we need," she said in a classic understatement.

Carlos Pacheco School, which for most of its life was known as the Mt. Pleasant Street School, is just one of seven century-old elementary schools in New Bedford still in use. All of them were built between 1907 and 1922.

Two other 100-year-old buildings are used for the city's two alternative high schools — Whaling City Jr./Sr. High School (a school for the system's most at-risk students is located in the 1909-built former district high school) and Trinity Day Academy (a school for challenged students is located in part of the old vocational high school, also built in 1909).

With state assistance, there are plans some time in the next few years to replace two of the nine 100-plus-year-old schools — the DeValles and Congdon schools in the South End. But the rest of the old schools will have to wait, some of them probably a decade or more, to be replaced by new schools, under the current procedures of the Massachusetts School Building Authority's new construction assistance program.

The MSBA assesses need on a variety of factors related to the adequacy of buildings, but none of its categories include the age of a structure, a community's inability to fund a new school, or inequities related to race or income levels of students.

A May 26 Boston Globe analysis has found the MSBA is spending far more money per pupil on white students than students of color.

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New Bedford continues to struggle with its century-old schools — nearly all of them located in low-income neighborhoods. Meanwhile, the MSBA, established by the state in 2007, has repeatedly funded the cost of replacing suburban schools built in the 1960s and 1970s. Among the suburban districts that have received funding for newer schools are affluent Newton and Plymouth. And just down the road, Westport received funding for a new $97 million junior/senior high school, which opened three years ago to replace a school built in 1961.

PCBs had been discovered at the Westport middle school, but the town had enough buildings to house the students in other district buildings at the elementary and high schools. Not optimum, but neither are New Bedford's century-old schools. It's an example of how 50- and 60-year-old buildings in the suburbs are being replaced with MSBA assistance even as multiple 100- and 115-year-old ones in New Bedford are not.

Last year, of 10 school building programs approved by the MSBA, nine of them were for schools built after 1951. Meanwhile last year, the MSBA declined to approve an application from New Bedford to replace the Charles Ashley Elementary School, built in 1922, and the Jireh Swift Elementary, built in 1909, with a single new structure.

There are additional inequities in the Massachusetts programs for providing financial aid for new schools, according to O’Leary.

The state allows both agricultural and charter schools alternative funding systems. In the case of county agricultural schools, the funding is passed on to individual county municipalities, which, even if they cannot afford to upgrade their own schools, must fund the regional one. New Bedford has just 20 students attending Bristol Aggie.

In the case of charter schools, the new buildings cannot be funded by the state but they are eligible for tax credits and bonds not open to the districts.

Voc-tech schools also have an advantage, as the state allows them a higher level of reimbursement, ostensibly because the vocational facilities are more expensive.

While the nine century-old New Bedford school buildings have sat without upgrades, Greater New Bedford Voc-Tech and Bristol Aggie have added new additions, and Alma del Mar charter school constructed its second new building. The GNB Voc-Tech addition, completed in 2014, cost $17 million. An expansive Bristol Aggie addition costing $103 million opened last year, as did Alma del Mar's Frederick Douglass campus at a cost of $24 million.

O’Leary notes that district schools are governed by the Education Reform Act of 1993 and argues that the law did not anticipate the need of district schools to spend money on maintaining schools, so urban district schools fall behind the other types of public schools in the state, with the higher reimbursement rates or more novel ways of funding.

There seems to be a lack of awareness and a misperception about the inequities, he said.

"I think there is a general perception that the MSBA takes good care of districts like New Bedford," he said.

Officials with the MSBA did not respond to my requests for a comment.

John McCarthy, in the May 26 Globe article, said the authority is simply looking for the worst buildings, and it's not its fault that some urban schools cannot afford to pay their share. The MSBA is picking them for construction when they apply and are qualified.

"It's not like we weren't there to do our part," he told The Globe. "It's that they couldn't afford to do their part."

The reasons that the MSBA has replaced so many 50-year-old suburban schools, even as it has left in use so many 100-year-old urban schools, is complicated. Part of it is because urban schools can't afford to pay for the 20% local contribution to the schools that the state places on the local districts. More affluent suburban districts absorb that cost more easily.

What's more, urban districts have begun to argue that the MSBA's 80% reimbursement rate is phony. The real reimbursement rate is much less, as low as 40% they argue, because the state disqualifies items like site work, Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, and construction costs that long ago exceeded what the MSBA will reimburse.

"What's the real reimbursement rate?" asked O’Leary. The real reimbursement rate is coming in at 40-50%."

That makes a financially hard-pressed urban district much less likely to even apply to the MSBA for a big building project, never mind a City Council or voters approving it even if the MSBA has accepted it.

Voters in the cities of Lynn and Holyoke have refused to pass Proposition 2½ overrides for MSBA-approved construction.

O’Leary, set to take over as New Bedford's interim superintendent after June 30, argues that the MSBA's school construction program is totally inadequate to replace older urban schools in places like New Bedford and Worcester, and in fact, no city in the state has borne the burden of more 100-plus-year-old schools than New Bedford.

The New Bedford administrator refers to a 2016 MSBA statewide survey in which the authority rated all schools across the state in terms of adequacy from best (1) to worst (4). The district with far and away the highest percentage of "worst" category schools was New Bedford with 67%. The only other two districts that came close were Holyoke, with 48% and Worcester with 45%.

"Add in the increasing diversity of (the New Bedford Public Schools) and its isolation from Greater Boston, the legacy costs of being an environmental justice community and more, and I think I am justified in saying we are an outlier in terms of need, where learning environment equity issues are most pronounced," O’Leary wrote me. He was responding to my question about why he believes the need is so much more significant in New Bedford than any other community in the state.

"By the same token, the state of MA can move a greater % of students into modern learning environments by focusing on New Bedford," he said.

In the 16 years that the MSBA has been in existence, New Bedford has managed to build just one completely new school — the Irwin Jacobs — and add an addition on to a second building — now the Taylor School at Sea Lab.

The principal reason that Jacobs School got built reasonably quickly may have been that the roof had literally collapsed at the old Hannigan School, another New Bedford school that was more than 100 years old.

Newton, a suburban district about the same size as New Bedford, since 2007 has won slightly more funding than New Bedford, even though it is much more affluent.

Under a previous, and more generously funded state school building program, New Bedford did better for a while under the administration of former Mayor Fred Kalisz Jr. Between 2001 and 2006, the city built three big new middle schools, but then poor planning got it in trouble under the administration of former Superintendent Mike Longo.

The third school, Keith Middle, was sited on a former PCB dump, and cost overruns almost doubled the original cost. As a result, New Bedford lost its right to build two new elementary schools planned by Kalisz under the state's old school building program.

Alarmed at the escalating costs of the SBA school building program, the state bowed out of it in 2007 and replaced it with the MSBA, a program that paid for what was called "accelerated repairs" instead of replacing some older buildings. This helped urban districts like New Bedford for a while, as it absorbed as much as $40 million to do repairs. New Bedford mainly used the money to address problems in its 50-year-old schools. But the seemingly indisputably greater need at the 100-year-old schools continued to go unmet — not because the city did not apply, but because new construction was working so slowly through the MSBA process.

Last year, with inflation pressing the MSBA, the agency even put on hold the accelerated repair program. So now, districts like New Bedford can't afford to either repair or upgrade schools, never mind replace them.

During the same era as the old School Building Authority, suburban Newton, with state aid, built one of the five most expensive high schools in America, the $197 million Newton North High School, which opened to architectural awards and much fanfare in 2010, under the predecessor to the MSBA, the School Building Authority. The previous Newton North High had been built in the same era as New Bedford High School, but with so many 100-year-old buildings on its agenda, the city of New Bedford has not even thought about replacing its high school yet. The high school did get a maintenance upgrade under the accelerated repair program.

Newton has been able to build a new elementary school and add a massive wing to a second elementary school since 2007.

Last year, even as the state agreed to build regional new vocational high schools in the Blackstone Valley and Franklin County, a new elementary school in West Bridgewater and a new high school in Salem, it rejected the new Ashley-Swift building that would have replaced two 100-year-old elementary school buildings in New Bedford.

The buildings being replaced in Blackstone Valley, Franklin County, West Bridgewater and Salem were built in 1969, 1975, 1968 and 1976 respectively.

I asked the three members of the New Bedford legislative delegation who live in the city about the situation, and they all say the funding formula may need to be revamped.

Rep. Tony Cabral sent a written statement saying the MSBA aid formula "urgently" needs to be remedied, and that he has spoken with O’Leary about it. He said he's committed to doing what he can legislatively to change the formula.

"This is an issue for New Bedford and Gateway Cities across the Commonwealth; communities that have experienced historic underinvestment in education," Cabral wrote.

Rep. Christopher Hendricks, who represents the city's first minority-majority district, said the Globe analysis was the first time he had heard that the MSBA procedures are so inequitable. But he said he will now co-sponsor legislation to remedy it. "It's horrible," he said.

He noted that with the escalating construction costs due to inflation and supply-chain issues, the Legislature was already going to have to further increase funding beyond what Gov. Maura Healey has already pledged.

Sen. Mark Montigny also provided a written statement, noting that this year's Senate budget includes an additional $100 million for the MSBA and has increased its annual spending cap by $400 million. That plan would also create a commission to review the authority's financial capacity and funding formula to ensure greater equity.

"New Bedford needs and deserves significant assistance from the state to support our children and local tax base," he said.

The activist group Lawyers for Civil Rights has questioned the MSBA system, and O’Leary says he thinks a lawsuit may be necessary to move the Legislature and governor to revamp the system.

O’Leary points out that it was a civil rights lawsuit that led to the education reform act of 1993, which greatly increased state aid to urban school districts in Massachusetts. Regional vocational schools in Massachusetts, which have adopted an admissions process that some believe is discriminatory to students of color and disabled students, is also under threat of a lawsuit for their practices.

O’Leary thinks it's just a matter of time before there is a suit over the state's building aid, and he says no community has been hurt by it more than New Bedford, for whom he thinks there should be a special carveout by the state, given that it far and away has the highest number of school buildings deemed inadequate.

"The timeline here is key," said O’Leary, pointing out that the city's century-plus-old buildings are already long overdue for closure but are caught in a system where some are not even close to being replaced.

"Any work to renovate or replace a building can take up to a decade. So when are we going to start?" he asked.

Email Jack Spillane at [email protected].

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