Seniors may get center at Bresnahan

NEWBURYPORT — The city is making headway in its attempts to get money for a new Bresnahan School and an expanded Nock School, and is throwing another project into the mix: a senior center on the Bresnahan School grounds.

Mayor Donna Holaday announced recently that the city's plans to build a senior center at Cushing Park are not working out. Instead, she would like to see a senior center as part of the Bresnahan School project.

"There are discussions about making the Bresnahan a new senior center," said school Superintendent Marc Kerble, who said Holaday will go into more detail on that score at an upcoming public hearing on June 6 in the City Hall auditorium.

"Right now, (Assistant Superintendent) Deirdre Farrell is working on everything that needs to be done for Massachusetts School Building Authority," Kerble said. "Mayor Donna Holaday is working on the fiscal end of it. There's a lot to this."

The city last year chose the Cushing Park site for a senior center and expanded the concept to become a community center geared toward a variety of age groups and interests. Holaday, who has long thought that there may be better choices for a senior center site, said the concept of a community center isn't working out.

City leaders aimed to spend $6 million to $7 million using private funds and a combination of city, state and federal funding. But the momentum to come up with the funding never really got going, Councilor Ed Cameron said. Federal and state grant opportunities began drying up, and the city's appetite for a property tax hike to pay for it was seriously diminished by the downturn of the economy.

"The expense associated with building a new building — that has been tough to overcome in this economic climate," Cameron said. "The ability to raise private funds has been tough with the economy, and the availability of any government funds has been really diminished in the last couple years. For those reasons, there's been interest in thinking of other alternatives that would get us a senior center."

When the city's application through the Massachusetts School Building Administration to build a new elementary school behind the existing Bresnahan School was welcomed into the pipeline, talk turned to using portions of the Bresnahan for a senior/community center.

"It's a concept the mayor is interested in," Cameron said. "I think there has been some conversation with the Council on Aging about it. It's a great location — very accessible. The neighborhood impacts would be less than Cushing Park, and it would be a bigger building than what we would have at Cushing Park."

The cost would be considerably less, too. Instead of the $6.5 million, getting the Bresnahan updated to meet the needs of seniors would cost closer to "several hundred thousand" dollars, Cameron said.

"There's also been interest in making the senior center somewhat of a community center in that there are activities for other ages, and that would work well because you'd have the school in the back, which would work well for intergenerational programming," Cameron said. "So it seems like a good idea."

School projects

The state has placed the Bresnahan and Nock schools on the fast track for funding based on the condition of both buildings. But whether the city ends up with a new elementary school and renovated middle school building will depend on whether city councilors agree the city should foot a portion of the bill when the request is presented to them June 13.

Kerble said the school district aims to construct a new elementary school for children in grades prekindergarten through 3 on the grounds of the existing Bresnahan Elementary School and undertake a large enough renovation of the Nock Middle School building to make it, for all intents and purposes, brand new.

"The Massachusetts School Building Authority is the authoritative body in school buildings, and for us to have two schools in the pipeline is an opportunity for the district that won't happen again," Kerble said. "I look at it as a tremendous opportunity for Newburyport and for the community."

Plans to place Newburyport in the pipeline for the "model" school program, which utilizes an existing design used by several school districts across the commonwealth as a means of saving time and money, were announced in mid-February. The district has been seeking funding through the MSBA for capital improvements to Nock and Bresnahan since 2007.

Now school and city officials are seeking a bond authorization on June 13 of about $700,000 for feasability/design costs, and a still uncertain amount not to exceed that cost, to hire a project manager to oversee the Nock Middle School project.

Kerble said the optimal scenario envisioned by school officials is to take students in grades prekindergarten and kindergarten currently at G.W. Brown School in the South End, and bring them up to the new school building behind the existing Bresnahan School. The one-time neighborhood elementary school once served students of the South End and Plum Island in grades kindergarten through 4, but the three-story layout and older building infrastructure has proved problematic for the youngest schoolchildren in the city. And in Kerble's opinion, bringing the youngsters up to the Bresnahan is the way to go.

"What we want, and our priority, is to have a pre-K through grade 3 building," Kerble said. "That's a large school considering our enrollment — it's five classes and gets us out of an old building. Right now Bresnahan has 481 kids and Brown has 242, so that's a big building."

Kerble said the current school configuration that places fourth- and fifth-graders under the umbrella of the Molin Upper Elementary School will remain the same, as it's currently working well. Molin was created in 2008 after budget limitations forced a reconfiguration of the city's three neighborhood elementary schools and the closure of one, the Kelley School, which is now used by the city Youth Services Department.

"Right now, the Molin School is a separate school within a school," Kerble said. "And it works."

Considering that the Nock and Molin schools projects would happen simultaneously, Kerble sees an opportunity in Newburport's near future to have all children attending school in new, state-of-the art facilities.

The MSBA program guarantees the state will pay 44.89 percent of the Bresnahan building project cost and 44.26 percent of the cost to renovate the Nock/Molin Schools. There are additional percentage points offered for green incentives, which could boost state allocations to as much as 52 percent for Bresnahan, and 47 percent for Nock and Molin. The School Building Committee will meet to discuss the projects on Wednesday at 7 p.m. in the City Hall mayor's conference room. It will be brought to the auditorium for a public hearing on June 6 at 7 p.m.

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