School Committee floats building new high school and moving middle school as part of long-term infrastructure plan

Dartmouth needs a new middle school. The solution? Build a new high school. 

That’s the plan Assistant Superintendent James Kiely proposed at the Sept. 25 School Committee meeting in a preliminary discussion. 

The town could build a new high school on the aging middle school’s site, then move middle schoolers to the current high school building. That move would create space in the middle school for grades 5 through 8, which in turn would free up space in all of the town’s elementary schools. 

The town could then close Cushman Elementary, which is more than a century old. 

Kiely said the project would create the largest impact for the most students. 

“We really feel that the community would benefit most from not building a middle school, but building a high school,” Kiely said. “It focuses on one major project that we could fund and it would improve the educational experience for the entire district.”

The space that the middle school is on currently could also be used to improve parking limitations in the area, Kiely said, as parking frequently overflows during football games. 

With or without this proposal, the town will need a new roof for the current high school building. Other necessary projects within the 40-year-scope include replacing all three elementary schools and renovating Dartmouth Memorial Stadium.

“It’s a little different than our existing approach which has essentially been to band-aid the buildings,” Kiely said. 

School Committee Chair Kathleen Amaral said she was “quite excited” about the possibility of a new building at the site of the middle school.

School Committee Vice Chair Chris Oliver said he’s “torn,” as he thinks the condition of Potter and DeMello is “abysmal” and “an embarrassment” that needs to be addressed. 

“We should be prioritizing our elementary schools and turning them into 21st century learning environments,” Oliver said. “We have a beautiful high school and we’re gonna turn around and build a newer high school, I don’t know how the public’s gonna take that.”

Kiely said Oliver is right that Potter and DeMello need to be replaced, but so does the middle school.

While Cushman Elementary may be the oldest school in town, the Massachusetts School Building Authority, which funds and supports school building construction in the state, rated Dartmouth Middle School as the building in the worst condition in its 2016 review. 

Cushman School was built in 1922, DeMello and Potter were built in 1955, Dartmouth Middle was built in 1956 and Quinn was built in 1967. The high school is by far the newest building: it was constructed in 2002. 

School Committee Member Elizabeth Coughlin said she sees how Kiely’s proposal affects the greatest number of students and gets the most benefit. 

A plan outlined by outside consultants in 2017 recommended closing Cushman Elementary, renovating the other elementary schools and prioritizing a new middle school in a future project. However, Kiely said he thinks the likelihood of stringing multiple MSBA projects together is “pretty slim.”

School Committee member John Nunes recommended getting Sen. Mark Montigny and Rep. Chris Markey involved in any new project to help get the attention of the MSBA. 

The presentation comes in the wake of the town’s new long-range capital planning committee, which acknowledged the need for both a new middle school and a new high school roof.

Kiely’s proposal was just the beginning of a preliminary discussion about long-term planning projects, and future work toward the proposal would require a cost estimate, discussion with the Town and community, and eventually an application to the MSBA for the funding. As such, the absolute earliest that construction could begin on this type of project, if chosen, would be three years from now, he said.