A post in the ER2 Facebook group on the night of October 27 asked whether the people running a school district “in the bottom ten percent of the whole state” are “planning to take the rest of Glendale Park to build a New High School.” The park and the hill behind it, the poster wrote, “was left to the citizens of Everett to enjoy as a Park. Not for a school.” By Thursday the thread had drawn more than 20 replies: that the land was donated and cannot be used for anything else, that the committee already said no, that the city said the same thing before the current high school went up on the hill in 2007, and one plain question, “Wait, where did that idea come from? Am I missing something?”
The short answer is that a Glendale Park school was one of the options on paper in January, and the School Building Committee voted on August 12 to take it off the table. The longer answer explains why the drawing exists.
Where the drawing came from
The city is in a Massachusetts School Building Authority feasibility study for a new or renovated Everett High School. The MSBA requires every district to study several sites, including the one it likes least, before it will fund a preferred one. “You have to look at all existing space,” School Committee Chair Samantha Hurley, who sits on the building committee, told the Advocate in August.
When the city went looking for an architect last winter, its January 21 designer briefing laid out the concepts the committee had discussed on January 14. They included a code-only repair of the current building, three ways to add onto it (toward Russell Street, toward Glendale Park, or toward the Gledhill Avenue housing), an all-new building on city land across Elm Street where the fire, police and recreation buildings sit, an all-new building at Rivergreen Park on the Malden River, and an all-new building on Glendale Park itself. That last concept came with an aerial diagram: “Phase 1, New Construction” shaded across the ball fields, “Phase 2, Demolition” over the existing school. The briefing’s own notes listed the problems: “It is highly unlikely that Glendale Park could be replicated on-site,” a “significant Article 97 impact: where would a replacement park be sited?”, the cost of creating a replacement park off-site, and the fact that it “does not help address system-wide overcrowding and the ability to reuse the existing school as a middle school.” Article 97 of the state constitution requires a legislative vote and replacement land before parkland can be put to another use.
The briefing also listed the hard part of every option on the current site: parking is already inadequate, construction would take fields and parking out of use, and any renovation would mean modular classrooms and building around students in an occupied school.
What the committee decided in August
The MSBA’s designer selection panel chose Perkins Eastman, whose Boston managing principal Robert Bell and designers Dawn Guarriello and Omar Santiago met the building committee in April, the Advocate reported. Guarriello walked through renovating the current school or building new at Glendale Park, at the old high school at 548 Broadway, or at Rivergreen Park, which former Mayor Carlo DeMaria had favored. Each site had a catch: parkland must be replaced if it is taken, the old high school is being renovated for seventh and eighth graders, and Rivergreen sits in a corner of a city where a very high share of high school students walk to school, many dropping younger siblings on the way. With that in mind, the committee voted on August 12 to eliminate Glendale Park as a possibility and to use the parking lot at Rivergreen, not the park, if Rivergreen is chosen. The committee’s August agenda shows the designer’s “diagrammatic test fits” on the table that day. Its minutes are not yet posted on the city’s committee page.
Bell said a new school would be designed for more than 2,800 students, up from about 2,200 enrolled now. On September 8 the School Committee voted 9 to 0 to send the MSBA a 100-page educational program, the document architects design around. The city’s solicitation put the possible construction budget at $400 million to $550 million, depending on enrollment and the solution the city and the MSBA agree on, with the state paying a share. The schedule in the designer briefing calls for a preferred schematic report to the MSBA in December, MSBA board action in February and schematic design by June 2027.
What the thread got right
Commenters were correct that Glendale Park is off the list and that the park’s history makes building there hard. They were also right that the drawing exists. The poster’s other claim, that there are “plans all drawn up for five connecting buildings in a campus type plot plan” with the present high school becoming a junior high, matches the “campus” language in the January briefing for the across-Elm-Street and Rivergreen concepts, and the city’s separate plan to turn the old high school on Broadway into a middle school. No site has been chosen. Perkins Eastman was to hold community forums this fall before narrowing the options for the state. Everett MA News will post the forum dates when the committee announces them.
