After nearly ten years of discussions and plans, the Concord Board of Education will hold a public hearing Thursday night to decide the fate of a new middle school in the city.
After the hearing, the board is expected to set a budget for construction and make an up ordown vote.
Current plans call for a new school to be built beside the current one, which would then be demolished, making way for new, grass playing fields to go in its place. Construction on the design is pegged at $155 million, though that retains the full slate of fields, multipurpose gym, full-size gym, 450-seat auditorium/flex performance space, and an accessibility ramp. It also includes $13 million in savings from rebates and credits related to the timing of construction and renewable energy.
The board’s building committee weighed potential features to reduce or cut from the initial plan to shave down some expenses: they recommended just over $2 million in reductions, about %1 of the total cost, largely by using different materials.
By contrast, HMFH architects, who have designed the school twice, are due to be paid $13.3 million for their work on this one project.
If the board moves forward with the plans to build the new school, construction would start in April 2026. Students would move in over the holiday break at the end of 2028, then the current school would be demolished in spring 2029, with students due to use the new fields by 2030, per a district timeline.
The building committee reexamined, then ruled out, the idea of renovating the current building. Once a renovation begins, the building has to meet certain codes. Doing that, and the prolonged construction timeline that comes with working on a school that still has students in it, meant that renovating wouldn’t be any cheaper, district officials were told by Harvey Construction, the firm that built new elementary schools in Concord more than a decade ago.
A soil study revealed that the updated school, renovated or built anew, would need a complex system of bracing embedded in the ground to meet earthquake codes. The relative ease of constructing that support before a new building, rather than adding it underneath an existing school, swayed district leaders away from renovation.
The hearing will take place at the Abbot-Downing School at 6 p.m.
Attached is a powerpoint from an info session on the project earlier this month.