At $155 million, a new middle school in Concord, with construction set to begin next month, would be the most expensive such project in state history.
After years of debate and decision-making, the school district has built a robust landing page for the project on its website, assembling and sorting by year a volume of documents. Its files span everything from the latest traffic study on bus and drop-off routes at the new school back to exploratory reports of a partnership with the YMCA from 2017, and beyond.
It’s worth noting the district was under no legal obligation to create the page. It assembled these records in a single, well-organized place, so residents didn’t have to dig through years’ worth of old agendas or watch hours of video to find an old study or report. It includes a wider swath of documentation than is typical in Concord, like the city’s new police station, for example. While the page does include some reports advocating for the project, it isn’t crowded by district narrative.
Yet you won’t find everything about the project on this page.
One of the biggest questions around the school’s construction, both before and since it got a green light from the school board, has been why it is so expensive. Construction inflation, broadly, has been the answer to that question, though it’s more complicated than that.
Granular data on costs and itemized lists of materials haven’t been made public. A line-by-line breakdown of larger cost estimates within the $155 million budget, like site work, isn’t posted. Construction experts said they needed to protect the estimates to ensure a competitive bidding process
At the same time, the page demonstrates the benefits and limitations of government transparency. The good news is that thousands of pages of Concord school records are available for public inspection. The bad news is that the site takes a lot of clicking and reading unless you know what you are looking to find, and it’s not easy to query to find specific information, never mind the missing information. Even a basic cost per square foot for the project can be hard to find.
Searching for answers
Like many of her neighbors in the South End’s “college streets,” Mila Paul came to a neighborhood forum about the new middle school last week with concerns about plans to route bus traffic through her neighborhood.
But she also asked a pivotal question: “So, what happens with our feedback?”
How would residents, she wondered, be able to see how their commentary was considered, or not considered, by the district?
Paul was told, a record of the neighborhood input at the forum would be taken up by the committee dedicated to the project and its thoughts would be documented, too. Any updates to the traffic study would also become available. All of this would be labeled and linked on the project homepage.
Residents can also sign up for monthly updates on the 205,562 square-foot school that will be designed to hold 900 students.
Inside the data
One answer to the question of why the school costs what it does centers on the decisions made by the board about what to include and not include in the school. Keeping an auditorium in the plans cost about $2 million of the total.
Another huge expense on top of the overall project cost is for design, which is currently approved at $13.3 million.
The Middle School Project page has a link to the district’s initial 75-page contract with its design firm HMFH, which calls for a $10.3 million fee schedule among the documents posted in under 2024. Yet under its 2025 documents, it doesn’t show the extra $3 million the school board approved to pay HMFH for redesign after the school was moved back to the South Street.
At the end of last summer, the design team presented the board with possible reductions, or “value engineering,” and how much they would save. You can see those options in this spreadsheet from Sept. 10, like how a cafetorium instead of a new auditorium would have lowered the price by $2.4 million or how each playing field is expected to cost a little under half a million dollars.
Here are some other notable resources on the site, if you’re looking to get caught up.
See the projected aesthetic of the school in this rendering. Other details about the look and layout were recently updated here.
In this meeting from March 6 of last year, the building committee hears in some detail from its design team about the idea of renovation.
When the board signed off on construction in October, this summary of the project was presented at the public hearing.
Most details of the project’s progress get fleshed out by the building committee, which meets semi-regularly (though major decisions are left to the board). Those wanting to stay up to speed on the project should track its work or reach out to its members, which you can see here.