Elementary study on the table, again

The Norwood School Committee met last week for its first meeting of the new school year, and it looks like the district may already be butting heads with the Town Administration.

While classes hadn’t started when the committee met, the focus was on future issues – mainly the condition of the elementary schools and how the Norwood Public Schools District (NPS) will fund repairs and maintenance to those buildings.

Readers may remember that former Townwide Facilities Director Paul Riccardi had laid out estimates that the elementary schools would likely need nearly $100 million of maintenance in the coming decades. And so, because of that and other issues, NPS and the School Committee submitted to the Capital Outlay Committee (COC) a request for a school facilities study to assess which schools are in the worst condition and need the most work. The study funding request is set at $300,000.

This is important, as much of the cost of these eventual projects could be shared with the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) which helps municipalities build and maintain costly school buildings (the new Coakley School was one such project, and the current Norwood High School was the first such project when the MSBA was formed).

The MSBA chooses submissions based on a lottery system, with age and need being weighted into each draw. So knowing exactly what buildings need how much work would allow the district to submit to the lottery with the, hopefully, best chances at success and therefore, less cost and fewer taxes spent on the school buildings from the Norwood homeowner.

But this study was originally submitted in 2025, and before this year’s May Town Meeting, the idea was removed from the warrant article at the request of the Town, according to a memo from NPS Superintendent Timothy Luff – https://gvimes.link/facstdy

Basically, the schools are contending the longer this assessment is put off, the more costly the repairs could be, both with inflationary concerns as well as MSBA concerns, even if the Town is saving $300,000 today by not doing the study.

The School Committee decided to make it a Town-wide buildings study to increase buy-in and decrease departments competing for funding. The town-side has since been removed, at the request of the General Government administration.

And now, Luff said it seems like the COC may be looking to push it back another year.

“When we got to Capital Outlay, there were questions about why the Town was there, what this study was entirely, and they almost acted as if they did not know what it was,” Luff said. “Which was disheartening, I will share. I was asked to provide more information.”

School Committee member Joan Giblin said she felt this was similar to a past incident with the Town side of the government last year, where the committee had assumed the Town was informed, and that wasn’t the case.

“We voted in good faith, assuming the process had been laid out as expected. [But] when our representatives got to the meeting they were going to, suddenly, our warrant article was gone, pushed back or it wasn’t time,” she said. “This feels very reminiscent of that, and it makes it very hard for us as an elected board to follow our protocols when things constantly keep changing like that.”

School Committee member Judith Bromley said she felt like the Town was trying to make passage of this study less likely by removing the general government component of the study.

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“I think it’s clear what the Town is doing; ‘Take us out of it, we’ll continue to push this away and we’ll keep forgetting about your building assessment,’” she said. “But if we have it as a collaborative hold, we’ll be more likely to get more buy-in from everybody. I think it’s disingenuous of them to do that, and I think it’s pretty transparent what their political motive is. We are one Town, everybody works together, and these are everybody’s buildings. I don’t think that was a fair thing for them to do.”

Chair David Hiltz said the concerns from the Town appear to be budgetary and to save money.

Luff also pointed out that the new assessment would take all previously collected data, like the electrical assessment that just came in and a 2015 assessment that led to the Coakley Middle School replacement project.

“This assessment would take all of that old data and put something together for us and make a priority of needs over the next five, 10, 15 or 20 years where we could have a facilities master plan for the whole school system,” he said. “I would love it to be for the whole Town, and I will keep on saying that the idea was for the whole Town so that we’re not competing for (funding) recommendations against the Library that might be falling apart, for example.”

Hiltz also pointed to the MSBA’s system, and said it would save money in the long run to get the study done as soon as possible, as it makes it more likely the elementary school buildings – which range in age from 57 to 113 years old – will get funding. The issue is need. So if something big comes up in a school, like, a heating system fails completely and for it to be a functioning building, the Town is required to pay for a new one. With that new system, the school’s potential priority in the MSBA lottery gets bumped. Basically, if you have recent repairs, your weight in the lottery goes down.

“If you do a significant renovation and then try to go in with the MSBA on that building, you lose points,” Hiltz said. “So it’s sort of trying to make sure your chances to win the lottery are great when you try to go in.”