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Legacy Farms Impact
on
School Committee members at odds over impact
By Demian David Tebaldi
At last night’s
meeting of the Hopkinton School Committee, Mr. David Stoldt, committee
member and liaison between the committee and Boulder Capital, LLC,
delivered a report concerning the likely impact of
“With respect to the schools, our three biggest issues with respect to Legacy Farms are the operating budget issues, the capacity and costs constraints, and the potential for fixing our agricultural land agreement as a result of our high school project.”
“The operational cost issue is this in a nutshell – as we began to see a decline in our student population, that creates a chance for us to redeploy our resources. As you begin to reduce your teaching force and your staff, now you’ve got additional monies under the current budgets. When you look at things like full day kindergarten, or district schools, things that we are enabled to do as a result of reducing the student population comes into question when you backfill that, and so we may not be able to easily do certain things, like a pilot program for full day kindergarten because we don’t have the two or three classrooms available.”
“As to the capacity and cost restraints, once we move to a new grade configuration with the development of the early childhood center, research shows a constraint in the elementary schools of three to four classrooms.”
“We’re short,” noted committee member Rebecca Robak.
“We’re short three to four classrooms in the elementary school starting in 2013 or 2014,” responded Mr. Stoldt.
“There was a study
done in 2004, at which time it was discovered that the cost of two new
classrooms at the
“So what we want to do here is decide what we want to ask for in terms of mitigation. It seems to me that last year when this whole discussion came up, we set the expectation with [Boulder Capital] that we had no problem with the number of students they were forecasting. It seems to me that if we are going to talk about mitigation it should be if they exceed by some threshold the number of students they have forecasted,” committee member Phil Totino mentioned. MORE... ‘Yes and no,” responded Mr. Stoldt. “They never gave us a phasing plan laying out when these discrepancies were going to hit. The Judy Barretts of the world say ‘your ratios are too low,’ Connery says ‘fine, we’ll raise our ratios, even though we think they’re too high,’ at which time we are forced to take another look. I don’t think we can just say ‘hey, we said we could absorb you,’ but I think we could certainly say that we don’t believe you have to pick up the whole cost, it’s a community thing. But I’m not so sure. When you know there’s a problem coming, based on someone else’s numbers, the community shouldn’t have to pick up that cost. I don’t think the start of the negotiation process should be ‘we said we could absorb it, now we’re not so sure.”
“My point is that if the student numbers significantly exceed the numbers their research give us…if we build an early childhood center and create a problem for ourselves at Elmwood and Hopkins, if we didn’t do that, there would be no shortage [of resources],” Mr. Totino said.
“Well, there would be no shortage if Legacy Farms didn’t exist,” said Mr. Stoldt.
“A year ago, we were all very enthusiastic about Boulder Capital and Legacy Farms, they were a multimillion dollar baby, and we said ‘we support you.’ Now, at the eleventh hour, we’re going to nickel and dime them?” queried Mr. Totino. “I know where I stand on the issue, let’s just move along.”
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