“The current school was built over 50 years ago,” said Lea Anderson, chairwoman of Wayland’s high school building committee. “It was just very small and crowded for the program we were offering. It had outlived its life expectancy.”
Wayland’s new high school will open in January, while Wellesley’s will open in February.
Like officials in other districts, Anderson praised the Massachusetts School Building Authority, which was created in 2003 to replace what many saw as a flawed system for providing funds for school construction projects.
By the state’s own account, the old system was “unsustainable.” It had accumulated more than $11 billion in debt and had 428 schools on its waiting list. Cities and towns often waited years to receive their first reimbursement payments.
“The whole program needed to be reformed,” said Matt Donovan, chief of staff for the building authority. “The oversight was lacking.”
Under the new system, which is funded through revenue derived from the state sales tax, authority officials work more closely with districts to ensure project budgets don’t get out of hand. The state also now pays reimbursements to districts as costs are incurred, rather than years later, a change the state says has already saved communities $2.9 billion in borrowing costs.
“This is a much more efficient system,” Anderson said. “The state would ask questions about every particular room, every storage space. They would push back, as was their responsibility.”
Anderson said Wayland officials and the state went back and forth over the high school’s projected enrollment, which helped determine how large of a facility to build.
“There was a lot of negotiating that went on in the early stages,” Anderson said. “I think we’re at a good place. I think we’re building a very appropriate, high-quality, but not fancy school.”
Another major difference between the old system and the new is the implementation of a model school program, which allows districts to speed up their projects and save on design costs by modeling their school on an already existing building.
