In a very close vote, the yeses won in North Adams’ special election on Tuesday, allowing the city to seize about $45 million in grants and move forward with the plan to build a new Greylock Elementary School.
By our lights, this was the right move. No matter how much opponents might have quibbled with enrollment projections, it’s clear that North Adams needs at least two school buildings to house its elementary school populations — and it’s clear that two of the three city elementary school buildings are in no shape to provide an optimal learning environment. The only options on the table — beyond doing nothing and leaving many of the city’s youngest public school students stranded in crumbling and leaking facilities — were to repair Brayton or replace Greylock. The latter option was significantly cheaper for city coffers, thanks to city officials’ diligence in securing funding from the Massachusetts School Building Authority.
In the choice between grabbing the millions in MSBA grants available to build a shiny new Greylock or spending more local taxpayer dollars just to slap a Band-Aid on Brayton Elementary, we believe the voters of North Adams made the right decision. Now, the city’s school district can proceed with a building plan that best accounts for the future sustainability of its elementary education system. Yes, that will cost local taxpayers a bit more, but we believe that’s an investment worth making in the critical city infrastructure as well as the children and educators who depend on it.
Now, it’s up to North Adams’ municipal leadership to not only fulfill that investment but protect it. The plan for a new Greylock is the best step forward the city can take out of its currently concerning school building picture. But it’s also worth acknowledging how the district got into this position and how it might avoid it going forward. It’s no surprise that Greylock, first erected and last renovated when Dwight Eisenhower was president, is on its last legs. But the considerably younger Brayton building is in dire shape, too — so dire that its needed repairs would cost the city more than its share in completely replacing Greylock.
To be sure, North Adams is far from the only Berkshire community whose current officials are dealing with the fallout of past leaders’ deferred infrastructure maintenance. The Greylock project is the right move for North Adams to make right now, but it’s worth acknowledging a reasonable point raised by some opponents: What’s to stop the new Greylock from meeting the same fate as Brayton, which fell into its current disrepair over just a few decades?
We highlight that question not to diminish the success of Tuesday’s vote in favor of a wise investment in North Adams’ schools; we raise it because city officials can and must answer it. To fully convince the naysayers and those understandably concerned about property tax bills jumping a bit, North Adams must demonstrate that it will defend homeowners’ considerable investment in a new Greylock. The best way to do so is to embrace the same forward-thinking approach they took for the new school proposal and apply it to developing a serious preventive maintenance plan for this new school and all the city’s educational infrastructure.
That means, yes, spending more on preventive maintenance than in recent years — which might sound counterintuitive for a small city on shaky fiscal footing that just embraced a tax hike for the life of a bond that will pay for North Adams’ share of a new Greylock. Since the district plans to continue consolidating the city’s elementary students in two schools, the city should seriously explore getting the Brayton building off of the city’s plate and onto the tax rolls, which would make it a city revenue generator rather than a city budget liability. Regardless, like plenty of other Berkshire municipalities with pressing infrastructure deficiencies piling up, North Adams must learn the painful lesson of its current predicament. Kicking the can of preventive maintenance down the road (like passing up a massive pot of state and federal grant funding for a new school building) is penny-wise and pound-foolish, necessitating bigger and more costly interventions down the road. That goes for our roads, bridges, dams and, yes, our public schools.
One of the most compelling reasons in favor of moving forward with the Greylock project now is the fact that the sizable state and federal grant funding on the table represents a huge force multiplier for investment in the city’s schools — a sweet, sustaining apple at which the city will not get another bite for quite some time. We’re glad the majority of voters on Tuesday saw the benefit in seizing that opportunity while it’s in front of them. Credit where it’s due to city leadership who put years into getting the district over the finish line for MSBA grant eligibility, especially the efforts of Superintendent Barbara Malkas and Mayor Jennifer Macksey. Now it’s up to those leaders to protect the investment of taxpayer dollars that voters just entrusted with the district. That means starting as they mean to go on with a project to build out the district’s future and articulating a plan to ensure a new Greylock does not meet the same fate as the crumbling old one.