Barb Higgins wants her fellow school board members to stop delaying the inevitable. 

The Concord Board of Education has been weighing the location of the new middle school should go to a public vote, either in the spring or the fall, or to simply work on plans for a project at Rundlett. It will weigh site-to-site timelines and updated costs at a special meeting next week.

Higgins doesn’t see the point.

“We have a pile of work to do, and we know what the city wants,” she said Monday. “To wait three months until April or 11 months until November to get an answer that we already have is an incredible waste of time. … I don’t think the numbers will change the minds of the community.”

From her point of view, city residents have made clear that they want the middle school to stay in the South End, killing plans for a new school in East Concord. The question now is whether to continue with plans for a new school or to weigh a renovation.  

Some members of the school board, though, felt that their constituents wanted a say. The ballot questions that won support on election day require the board to get voter approval anytime it wants to relocate a district school. 

“What surprised me this past month was the amount of outreach I've had from my wards of people that want to vote,” Jessica Campbell said. “I had quite a lot of people asking for a special election.” 

Board President Pamela Walsh — who was reappointed to that leadership role by the board unanimously on Monday — said she had also heard from residents who wanted to be in the driver’s seat. 

“‘I voted to vote. I thought I was going to have a say,’” she recalled them saying. 

Not holding an election and officially pivoting to a Rundlett project would mark the end of the road for the project designed at Broken Ground. In a public vote, there remains a chance voters could back the East Concord proposal. 

Even the strongest defenders of the Broken Ground location don’t appear to be hanging any hopes on that — Walsh noted that she’d had thoughts of “let’s just get it over with and move on.” The majority of the board, though, agreed that they wanted to see the latest cost and timeline comparisons between locations, prepared by project experts over the last few weeks, before deciding. 

A motion from Higgins to proceed at Rundlett won words of support from some fellow board members, but was ultimately tabled to allow for a meeting to crunch the numbers scheduled for next week. 

At the same time, there were calls for the board to not build a new middle school at all and to instead renovate the 1957 Rundlett building. 

Members of the Concerned Citizens group who spent the last year urging the board to rebuild at Rundlett and who wrote the charter amendments prompting the board to backtrack focused their comments in public testimony last night on a call to renovate. 

The board voted in 2019 to rebuild instead of renovate, largely based on a September 2017 finding from its architects that renovating the current building to modern code would cost more than a new middle school for grades 6-8. 

The project’s current state of flux means renovation is back on the table for the first time in five years — but such discussions would come later, the board agreed. 

A special meeting to discuss cost comparisons of a new school at the Rundlett and Broken Ground sites as well as estimated timelines, which were presented to the board on Monday, has been scheduled for Jan. 15. 

Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com. Subscribe to her Concord newsletter The City Beat at concordmonitor.com.