Mattapan high school not in Hub’s foreseeable future

Howard Manly

For the last several years, City Councilor Charles C. Yancey has talked about building a new high school.

Armed with a 1996 report commissioned by Mayor Thomas M. Menino, Yancey has whispered and screamed from citizens group meetings to City Council sessions that the Boston Public Schools were short at least 1,100 seats.

The answer, Yancey argued, lay in the grounds of the old Boston State Hospital, where 20 acres of land had been set aside by the state for “mandatory educational uses.”

Yancey tried to build a consensus, tried to get community groups involved and tried to sell the story of a deserving neighborhood in Mattapan that was a prime site for what he considered to be more than a simple high school but a state-of-the-art community and adult learning center.

To the bitter end, Yancey remained a true believer. Just last month, the man first elected as District 4’s representative 24 years ago stood before a community meeting at the Mildred Avenue Middle School and publicly answered what attendees were privately questioning.

“If some of you are concerned about why Charles Yancey is focusing so much time on the high school, it’s because I know high school can be an equalizer,” he said, according to published reports. “I believe that we should have at least one state-of-the-art high school built in the city of Boston.”

Yancey might be right, but very few of the city’s power brokers have jumped on board.

In fact, Menino has questioned where the funding would come from; Boston public school officials argue that they don’t need a large high school at a time when they are moving toward smaller, “theme-oriented” learning clusters; and, worse, the owners of the land have run out of patience.

Construction of a new facility, according to a state stipulation, needed to start by July 2005. That deadline has long gone, and state legislation allows the state to reclaim the land. The state has already given a small four-acre slice to the University of Massachusetts biological laboratory.

Michael Thomas, project manager for the state Division of Capital Asset Management (DCAM), the state agency that controls the property, said as much two years ago when the deadline passed.

“Since no commitment for a high school has come forward,” Thomas explained, “we’re getting ready to be proactive and put the land to its best use.” The state then proceeded to draft requests for proposals to seek potential bidders to develop the land.

H. Peter Norstrand, deputy commissioner of the state Office of Real Estate Management, the department within DCAM responsible for the Commonwealth’s real estate assets, confirmed that requests for proposals would be sent out soon and explained the property could still be used for a school, but commercial use, such as a retail center, would be allowed as well.

It appears the final blow came earlier this week. Yancey was hoping that Gov. Deval Patrick would give the nod to the school. In a recent letter signed by 10 other Boston city councilors, Yancey asked Patrick to re-designate the land.

It’s unclear whether Patrick did or did not. What is clear is that funding for a new high school on Mattapan is not in the governor’s recently released five-year building plan.

Though his plan needs the approval of the state Legislature, Patrick said he intends to spend as much $12 billion on new college classrooms, laboratories, roads, bridges and other construction maintenance projects throughout the state, including a state-of-the art stem cell bank at the University of Massachusetts Medical School in Worcester.

Among the biggest beneficiaries of Patrick’s plan are the state’s public higher education campuses. Over the next five years, the schools would receive $750 million — one half going to the UMass system and the other half split among the 24 state and community colleges.

The new Mattapan high school was even shut out of the $500 million in state school construction money set aside for repairs or new construction. The deadline was last Tuesday and, according to state officials, 161 different school systems applied for the money.

The Mattapan high school was not one of them.

Yancey declined to return a telephone message for this story.

A Boston Public Schools official acknowledged that Yancey’s project never got off the ground. For starters, the official said, there is little need for a new high school at this date, largely because the number of public school students has dropped significantly since the release of Menino’s 1996 report calling for an additional 1,200 new high school seats. In 1996, for instance, 65,000 students attended public schools in Boston, according to published reports. Ten years later, that number dropped by 8 percent to 57,000.

Another problem is a shift in policy by the Boston Public Schools. Instead of large, heavily populated high schools, the Boston public school system is focusing on providing students with a small, more nurturing learning environment through smaller high schools and smaller learning communities. In fact, the official said, four large high schools — Dorchester, West Roxbury, Hyde Park and South Boston — were closed and 13 small high schools with enrollments under 400 were opened to replace them.

A final issue is the school’s current assignment plan. As it is now, the school official said, all city high schools are citywide and students have a choice of where they want to attend.

“There are no guarantees that students living in Mattapan would attend a high school in Mattapan, only if they selected it during the school choice process,” the school official said.

The bottom line is the money. School officials said the cost of building three new middle schools averaged about $40 million.

Stepping into this municipal bureaucracy is Barry Hynes, the son of the late John Hynes, the former mayor of Boston.

He too would like to see a new school on the site, but said he realizes that it’s an expensive proposition.

His idea is more in line with the new focus of the Boston public school system and would include building a small themed school specializing in science and math.

Hynes started Nativity Preparatory School in Roxbury in 1990, and strongly believes in smaller class sizes as a way of nurturing young minds.

“Nativity Prep has been an instant success,” Hynes said, explaining that the school is “extremely challenging” and is “as close to a private school as one can be.”

Hynes said it would take at least $500,000 to get such a school off the ground, and given the state of the land on the old Boston State Hospital grounds, there’s no telling whether the land would be available, even if he could raise the money.

Hynes said he is unfazed. He is starting a similar school in Hartford, Conn., and one focused on women’s leadership in Kigali, Rwanda.

“The whole idea is to separate the kids that are focused and motivated from the rest of the pack,” Hynes said. “It’s hard to perform academically when you are one of 25 kids in a class. They eventually fall through the cracks.”