Voters in five Massachusetts towns, including Carver, will head to the polls on Tuesday, Nov. 18 to decide whether to move forward with a new $288.7 million building for Old Colony Regional Vocational Technical High School in Rochester.
Residents of Carver, Lakeville, Acushnet, Mattapoisett and Rochester will collectively vote on whether to accept the new school project and a $129 million grant from the Massachusetts School Building Authority.
Old Colony’s proposal comes amid concerns about aging infrastructure and space restrictions in the current school, which was built in 1975.
A video shown to Carver residents in a project presentation on Thursday, Nov. 6 said that “the existing school building has reached the end of its useful life.”
According to the building project’s website, the Old Colony Building Project group wrote that while the current Old Colony facility is “well maintained and currently functioning,” it does not meet today’s accessibility, building and energy code requirements.
In the project presentation, the group noted plumbing and HVAC issues, as well as bathrooms that do not meet Americans with Disabilities Act requirements, as some of the issues with the current space.
The new building is intended to address these concerns and will raise the capacity of the Old Colony school from about 560 to 776 students.
Old Colony is a technical high school, dedicated to technical training for careers in the skilled trades and standard high school academics. Students in the five member towns can apply to attend as an alternative to their town’s public high school.
With the building project, it would introduce new program offerings with dedicated spaces for plumbing, HVAC and dental assisting.
According to Carver Superintendent Scott Knief, the town usually has between 90 and 100 students at Old Colony.
Rather than building a new school, Old Colony could move forward with repairs. However, during a project presentation to Carver residents, Old Colony superintendent Aaron Polansky said that the costs estimated for repairs were not much more than the bill to build a new school.
Polansky said that the estimated cost of repairs would be $134.3 million, an estimate he said was conservative.
“$134 million is a band-aid on a 50-year old building,” Polansky said. “You’d be constantly uncovering the next piece of the project in a repair without knowing really what you’re getting into.”
Should voters accept the proposal, the MSBA would contribute $129 million to the price tag of the new school, bringing the total cost to the district down to $159 million, not far from the cost of repairs.
The remaining costs would be divided among Old Colony’s towns. For Carver, the project group estimates a total cost of about $26.2 million.
Carver could fund its share through a debt exclusion, which would temporarily increase taxes so the town could borrow funds until a 30-year bond is paid off, after which the increase would expire. According to a tax estimate calculator on the Old Colony project’s site, the median Carver property valued at $517,364 would see a tax increase of about $321 per year with this method.
Should the school move ahead with repairs, it would cost an estimated $271 per year in taxes to the median household.
If the proposal passes, Carver and other towns would have to decide whether to fund the project using a debt exclusion or through their annual operating budgets. To pass, a debt exclusion would have to receive a two-thirds majority vote at Town Meeting and then a simple majority on the ballot in a townwide referendum.
Critics of the Old Colony building proposal, like the Massachusetts Fiscal Alliance, have argued that the project has lacked transparency, particularly when it comes to associated costs.
In a video posted on Facebook, the group claimed that a slide outlining the operational costs of the Old Colony school shown to the Lakeville Select Board in September showed the school’s operating budget rising to over $25.5 million after the construction of the new school building. A subsequent slide shown in Rochester presented a lower cost, according to the group.
The September presentation referenced in the video is published to the Old Colony Building Project’s website. The published presentation does not include any information about operating costs for the school.
During a Nov. 3 Rochester Select Board meeting, project organizers said that the slide outlining the increased operational budget was not meant to be presented as it was.
Chad Crittenden, executive director of the Boston PMA Consultants branch, which has worked on the Old Colony Building Project, said that the original estimate of $25 million had debt service built into it, which made the operating cost estimate that the fiscal group interpreted “confusing.”
Old Colony project organizers have since updated the operating budget estimate to be $11.3 million in fiscal year 2029, according to presentation materials published for November. Despite an increase in students, the operating budget estimate does not appear to substantially increase compared to if the new building was not built.
For the project to move forward, it needs the combined support of a majority of voters in all five Old Colony school district towns. Polls in Carver will be open from 12 p.m. to 8 p.m. on Tuesday, Nov. 18 at the Carver Middle High School at 60 South Meadow Road.
Contact Nick Mossman at nick@carverjournal.com
