The Construction Advisory Group (CAG) was formed last year and is tasked with making recommendations to the Mayor on the site of the new school being constructed for the Winter Hill Community Innovation School and potential unification with the Benjamin G. Brown School. At the CAG's December 18 meeting, an updated Somerville-specific timeline of our Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) process was shared, with projected dates given all the way to the end:

To the shock and dismay of many, the timeline had a December 2031 projected completion date for construction. This reaction might be down to expectation management, but when the ceiling fell at 115 Sycamore in May 2023 and the WHCIS community was displaced, the public was told this is a five- to six-year process and that we'd be pulling out all the stops to get a new school built in record time. So it's jarring to see we now expect it to be an 8.5-year process, and the community rightfully is asking questions.

One of the biggest questions is around the projected duration of the CAG and the full year of meetings required to deliver recommendations to the Mayor this fall. A number of CAG members as well as a sizable number of constituents have approached me to ask whether that much time is really needed for the CAG to meet and whether the process might be condensed to produce an earlier recommendation. I'm not sure what kind of work is required of the facilitator between meetings, but I do agree the CAG could do with more frequent meetings, especially if the members are in favor of this.

Late January saw the release of the Somerville School Building Project: Phase One Community Feedback Survey, designed to capture feedback on these siting and unification questions from the wider community. There was outcry from both the Winter Hill and Brown school communities about the survey questions and response options. CAG members expressed surprise and disappointment over not being allowed to preview the survey and that feedback given during the December CAG meeting did not appear to have been incorporated into the survey. A late item at the January 23 regular meeting of the City Council led to an extensive discussion of the survey, with some councilors expressing strong disapproval.

Some constituents expressed confusion over what appeared to be a shift in approach from the Administration with the introduction of this community survey. My understanding is that a community survey was planned all along as part of the Mayor's process of gathering feedback prior to making her decisions later this year. My question throughout all of this has been: Why does the School Committee not have an official key advisory role with these decisions?

We have an elected body dedicated to overseeing Somerville Public Schools and we are talking about decisions with major long-term impacts on the district. Decisions on the location of the new school and possible school unification should be part of a holistic, district-wide strategic plan taking into account catchment areas, enrollment projections, curriculum, programming, and staffing. But instead we have this drawn-out, convoluted public process to provide recommendations to the Mayor.

Yes, there is a budgetary push and pull between the School Committee and the Administration that complicates the relationship. And I get how the need to prioritize overdue and badly-needed investments in capital projects throughout the city is a key wrinkle here. I just don't understand making major decisions on schools like this without formal input from the body elected to oversee schools.

But as far as the CAG process, I agree with those calling for more frequent meetings to allow for an accelerated timeline for that recommendation. The reality is 115 Sycamore will go through one of two different types of demolitions, depending on whether it's going to become the site of a new school or open space. If we knew the answer to that question earlier, we could get a jump on that demolition and hopefully shorten the construction timeline somewhat. At this point anything we can do to get that new school built and opened earlier would be great news for the WHCIS community.