Hopkinton Residents In Favor of Town-Wide Schools

Survey data showed 61 percent of voters are likely to be against any form of dividing the town’s elementary schools based on location.

“Districting needs to go away, the data shows that it simply will not work,” Paul Flaxman said. Flaxman is a Hopkinton resident who worked with the to create and analyze the .

Districting however, isn’t the only issue that residents care about according to Flaxman. Through his data analysis, Flaxman was able to group the responses based on which ones appeared to have similar voter interest in them. For instance, many respondents who were worried about the total cost for the town also wanted the solution to use land that the town currently owns.

“It’s not so much picking one issue, but looking at how the issues work together,” Flaxman said.

The second part of the survey asked residents to look at seven hypothetical solutions for the school and rate the appeal of them.

The one solution that seemed to have to most respondents open to it was expanding the Elmwood School to house two separate school populations, but even that idea wasn’t without a large group of people saying that they were opposed to it.

“Even with the hypotheticals that people were asked to choose from, nothing is a slam dunk,” Selectman Todd Cestari said.

The full survey results presentation should be available on the school department’s website today, and members of both School Committee and the said that anyone with questions should feel free to get in touch with them.