Opinion

Our view: Scanlon deserves support in effort to keep BHS project affordable


Published: October 16, 2008

No question there are many good things going on inside Peabody High School. But it's also hard to argue with the New England Association of Schools and Colleges' description of the Lowell Street campus as a "drab, ugly, austere and warehouse-like building."

That's the way it was designed and built in the early 1970s, and that's the way it still feels and looks 35 years later. It's hardly the monument to education most would desire; but with other costs, including teacher wages and benefits, continuing to escalate, there appears little support for spending millions of dollars on a new high school right now.

Thus the decision to simply fix the things — like the HVAC system, which recently underwent a major overhaul — that need fixing.

That's the approach being contemplated by Danvers for its high school as well. The town also retrofitted the Holten-Richmond building recently for use as a new middle school.

Nevertheless, Beverly Mayor William Scanlon deserves much credit for continuing to push for a more ambitious plan to replace the academic wing at his high school which, like Peabody's, was built in the early '70s.

True, this is a project whose estimated cost has already gone from $65 million to $81.5 million. But Scanlon, who's got a great head for numbers and is more familiar than anybody with the state of Beverly's finances, continues to insist that this project is affordable.

He's not asking for an override of Proposition 21âÑ2. And he worked very hard lobbying the state's School Building Authority to come up with the maximum match, now estimated at 58 percent of the total cost.

Thus we'd urge the City Council to support Scanlon's plan to sell the former McKay School and several other surplus pieces of property to help offset the initial borrowing costs the high-school project will entail. He estimates the sale of these parcels would raise $3.4 million, which could be used to help finance the debt on the project in its most expensive first 10 years.

During his tenure Scanlon has overseen the renovation of all the city's elementary schools — also without having to seek a Prop. 21âÑ2 override. That and his work on the high-school project, are testimony to his determination and budgeting skills, but also reflect the pride residents take in their school buildings.