Last night, members of the Neary Building Committee chose not to delay their decision on the big school project.
According to the Chair, they cast a unanimous vote to approve the version voters will be asked to approve or reject at a Town Meeting in April. That choice was for a 4 grade school.
I still don’t have all of the details.* I’ll be writing more on this later this week once more information is available.
Although I don’t know the final bottom line expected for the project, a News Flash posted to the Town website sometime yesterday, inviting people to last night’s forum, confirmed that the committee would be choosing between:
1. New Two Grade School at Neary School Site
2. New Four Grade School at Neary School Site
3. Add/Renovation – Four Grade School at Neary School Site
The cost of the two grade option is currently at $65M (Original range that was surveyed was $60-$80M) and the highest four grade option is currently at $85M (original range that was surveyed was $85-$105M).
To be clear, those weren’t actually the total project costs, which are much higher. The figures represent the portion of the project that Southborough would be responsible for after deducting the expected grant/reimbursment from the Mass School Building Authority.
Yesterday’s invitation also claimed:
The Committee will continue its series of open forums and looks forward to continuing to hear feedback from the community to better shape the next steps. . .
Community feedback is vital for the decision making process. Please join us tonight in person or on Zoom!
Yet, the announcement was (again) not properly coded under the Neary Building Committee category (or any other), and therefore not emailed/texted to any members of the public that signed up for Town news. And NSBORO never followed up on the messaging glitch to send out messages to NSBORO parents or members of the public who had signed up for the Neary School Building Project alerts.
*I wasn’t able to zoom in to last night’s meeting, and last night’s meeting videos still aren’t posted to YouTube. The only news I have since Monday night’s meeting is an email NBC Chair Jason Malinowski, responding to my inquiry this morning with a message that included:
We’ll be issuing a formal update memo today, but in short, it was a unanimous vote to proceed with a four grade school. The Communication SC approved a release last night.
More details will be contained in the brief memo and obviously happy to answer any questions.
As of 5:43 pm tonight, the memo still hadn’t been issued. But I didn’t want to keep readers hanging about the outcome.
