Crowley Urges Hurld Community to Advocate for New School

“The time is now” to get the ball rolling on the next new elementary school in the city, School Committee member Joseph Crowley told the Hurld School PTO and audience Tuesday night, and he urged the audience to begin to advocate for the project.

The plan is to merge the and Elementary School populations in a new school, probably at the Hurld site.

What is lacking at this point, Crowley said, is “your public support.”

Come to a School Committee meeting before the end of this school year; start a petition, Crowley suggested, supporting the plan.

The hope, Crowley said, is to get an application in the state School Building Authority by the end of this coming summer to start the new school building process.

“This building is obsolete,” Crowley told the audience of about 25 people. It would be nice, he continued, to have state-of-the-art facilities.

“Your kids deserve it as much as anybody else,” he said.

The Woburn elementary school building effort started in the 1990s with the , Crowley said, followed by the . The Reeves was done first, he said, because residents there pushed for the project.

The “elephant in the room” at that time, Crowley said, was the old high school. “We were in danger of losing accreditation,” he said, with the old facility. Voters passed a debt exclusion, Woburn’s first, Crowley said, to support the new high school project.

The was done at the same time as the high school.

“Then we went for the ,” he said.

The state rated the old Goodyear School and the Wyman School as 4’s, the worst, Crowley said, and the Hurld a 3.

Ultimately, the plan is to combine the and  schools.

Financially, the state gave the city 55 percent of the costs of the Goodyear School project, Crowley said, and Woburn is in good financial shape.

State money for school buildings is “guaranteed,” Crowley said, because it comes from 1 percent of the sales tax.  So the state deficit does not affect that funding, he said.

The state school building agency loves Woburn, said Crowley, because it brings its school building projects in “on time and under budget.”

Crowley doesn’t want the Hurld-Wyman project to compete, he said, with the proposed library project. But “The need is here, too,” he said.

Ward 3 Alderman Mark Gaffney said he was in “total support” of the Hurld-Wyman plan. If we start now, we can get something in the pipeline in three, five, six years, he said.

In Woburn, “We are used to neighborhood schools,” Gaffney said. The consensus in the city, he continued, is to keep that concept.

Hurld Principal Eileen Mills also supports the plan.

“It’s huge,” Mills said, that the Hurld community would get a new school “in our neighborhood, right here.”

At the same time, “We need to be welcoming to the Wyman community, she said. We want to be “one big, happy family.”  She said she has roots at the Wyman. Without support from the Wyman community, this plan could be undone, she said.

Several audience members asked questions during Crowley’s 30-minute talk. One question: Can a new school be built on the Hurld site?

Crowley said he didn’t know.  Gaffney said he hopes the site is big enough for a new school. Generically, land could cost $4 million for the property alone, he said. Mills said the site is buildable.

Nothing will happen unless people get moving, Crowley said.

“We want to instruct the (school) superintendent to get our application in.  We hope to hear the results next spring," he added.

Then the city would have to put up money—$500,000, $600.00, $700,000, Crowley said, for an architect. Some of that money would be reimbursed, he said.

It could take three years to get a shovel in the ground to start the construction, he said.

"Now all you have to say,” Crowley said, “is, 'We want a school.'”

“If the community does not say, ‘We need a school,’ it won’t happen,” he added.