Many of you know that we live in the suburban paradise known as Newton, Massachusetts. While it is perpetually trendy to bash on the purported vacuousness and bland homogeneity of suburban lifestyle, I will never do that to my town. As I’ve mentioned before, we live in a fantastic neighborhood, and this was a great place to raise a family.
Of course, our town is not perfect. For example, if you were to ask most people what attracted them to Newton it would be (in no particular order) 1) proximity to Boston (we’re only 7 miles from downtown), and 2) the school system. I think it is safe to say that while the school system is quite good, it has had trouble maintaining its reputation over the past couple of years. There are a number of reasons for this, that I’ll talk about in another post. But it is clear that much of the success of the Newton students is often despite the school system, rather than because of it. The school budget is continually under pressure, and there appears to be inordinate amount administrative rather than teaching positions.
What has put Newton in the news lately, however, is the construction of the new Newton North High School, which has risen in estimated price from approximately $80 million to $200 million. (If you Google “Newton North High School Construction” you’ll get over 236,000 hits). Both of my children graduated from this school, and my wife has taught science there for the past 7 years. It is a very successful school in terms of the diversity of students it serves, and in terms of their student’s academic success. Spend a few minutes in the current building, however, and you can immediately see why it needs to be replaced. The HVAC system never worked well—the fluctuations in temperature from room to room are astounding—and the basic design is not “conducive to optimal learning” to quote from Chalk: The Musical. This Sunday’s Boston Globe Magazine published an article by Newton North grad and journalist Seth Mnookin that is the best I’ve seen detailing the history and some of the problems that led to the current state of affairs. One quote sums up quite nicely what has been obvious to those of us close to the situation:
The tragedy of this story is that during a time when teachers around the country, from New Orleans to Newark, are spending their own money on school supplies for their students, Newton could have had the exact same wonderful, new high school, with the same zigzag design, glass-walled cafeteria, and solar paneling, for tens of millions of dollars less, if only so many of Newton’s residents weren’t in love with the sound of their own voices.
Seth Mnookin knows whereof he speaks, both in terms of where to find students engaged in illicit activities, and his apt comments about the new school and the residents of the town it serves.
The “Taj Mahal” of high schools will be no such thing. Having recently spent time with a teacher and students from an extremely diverse (economically and all possible factors otherwise) suburb of NY, the new NNHS will be just about on a par with a reasonable facility serving as both a comprehensive high school and community performance and athletic center for a small city (which Newton is). I only hope that the flagrant design and construction mistakes that plague the building constructed in 1973 are not repeated in the new building that will open in… what was that year again?
Left by Nattu Swiete on June 4th, 2008