SEEM Will Lease Melrose Building, Not Clapp School

The SEEM Collaborative will not be leasing the after students are redistricted from that building at the end of this school year.

But the building may now go out to bid, said city officials.

SEEM Collaborative directors voted this morning to lease space in Melrose, at the .  They considered lease proposals from three communities:  Woburn, at the Clapp School; Melrose, at the Beebe School; and Stoneham, at the North and East Schools.

The cost to lease the Clapp School, the collaborative calculated, would have been a total of $718,000 for three years: $529,000 in rent plus an estimated $189,000 for electricity and gas, according to figures reviewed by the SEEM directors

By comparison, the cost to lease space at the Beebe School for three years would be $696,000: $555,000 in rent plus an estimated $141,000 for electricity and gas.

Stoneham submitted a proposal for the space at two schools in Stoneham, where the collaborative currently operated programs, for only one year. It was significantly higher than the Woburn and Melrose proposals. The collaborative was looking for a five-year lease. The Woburn proposal included three years and two additional one-year lease extensions.

The School Committee wants to lease the building for a number of years—five according to this proposed lease—to keep the space open as “swing space” when two elementary schools are redone.

A group of residents who live in the Clapp School neighborhood breathed a sigh of relief after the SEEM directors voted to lease space in Melrose for their program. They contend that the building cannot legally be leased and that using the space after students are redistricted out violates an agreement they made with the city.

But right after the SEEM vote, talk began about putting the property out to bid.

“We have to do something with it,” School Committee Chairman Patricia Chisholm said in a phone conversation after the meeting.

Mayor Scott Galvin, who attended the SEEM meeting with Chisholm and other Woburn officials and residents, mentioned the property going out to bid, Chisholm said.

“He said, ‘We have to find a use for it,’” Chisholm said.

Leasing the school would be “win-win,” she said.

Chisholm knows of no one interested in the building right now, she said.

A preschool has been suggested as a use for the Clapp School. But that “wouldn’t work in our budget,” Chisholm said.

The SEEM directors and SEEM Collaborative Executive Director Catherine Lawson, who presented the lease costs in all three communities, made no reference to any of the passed by the Woburn City Council Tuesday night.

One would have required that the renter pay for water and sewer service, at commercial rates.

Generally, when SEEM leases space, the collaborative pays for water and sewer separately from the lease, sometimes at the commercial rate, Clint Rowe, the collaborative’s director of finance and operations, told Woburn Patch after the meeting. In Melrose, SEEM has negotiated a lower-than-commercial rate, Lawson said.

The SEEM board spent about half an hour reviewing the three proposals. Among the topics: Melrose and Stoneham would allow students from pre-kindergarten through grade 12 in the leased space; Woburn, only through grade eight. A high school SEEM program in Wakefield might, at some time, need to be moved if its enrollment drops, Lawson said. With the grade restriction at the Clapp School, they could not move there.

All the Melrose space is handicapped accessible; parts of Woburn and Stoneham space are not.

The classroom size at the Clapp School is ideal; the Beebe classrooms, too big. Melrose offered the collaborative a credit to modify space there. That credit was reflected in the rental figures, according to the discussion.

The collaborative wants to be in the new space by Aug. 1. If the opening of the new Goodyear School was delayed, that would affect the collaborative’s plans.

The board members who represent the three communities that submitted lease proposal left the room during the lease discussion and vote. The trio are Woburn school Supt. Mark Donovan, Melrose Supt. Joseph Casey and Stoneham Supt. Dr. Les Olson.

SEEM already has one program in Melrose—the Hurd School, which operates out of the old Ripley Elementary School.

The Beebe School, which will house SEEM next year, currently houses the , a kindergarten through grade 6 program for gifted children. 

According to a January news release, Anova is planning on expanding its program to include middle school children. The school opened in Melrose in 2010 and has 32 students enrolled the accelerated elementary program. The school will grow at a pace to accommodate current sixth graders, according to Courtney Dickinson of Anova. She added that classrooms at Anova have only 14 students per room. 

The Woburn School Committee will next meet tomorrow night, Thursday, March 10, at 7 p.m., in the conference room in the administrative space at the .    The committee usually meets on the second Tuesday of the month. Tuesday’s meeting was inadvertently not posted, Chisholm said.