Plan to move Whittier Tech to college campus explored

Three months after voters in the northeast corner of the state overwhelmingly rejected a proposal to build a nearly half-billion-dollar facility for Whittier Tech, the region’s trade school, Governor Maura Healey’s office announced it is exploring a “shared campus” model that would move the school three miles across Haverhill to the campus of Northern Essex Community College.

“Our administration knows that a new, modern facility is needed,” Healey said in a statement, “but we also understand the communities’ concerns.”

The Whittier project has consumed the region since school officials announced in the fall that they had won a grant from the Massachusetts School Building Authority, which, along with other federal and state incentives, would contribute $180 million toward a new $444.6 million facility. Those funds would lower the district’s share to $267.5 million, a number that was touted as being cheaper than the cost to renovate the existing building and bring it up to code.

But, in January, voters in the 11 cities and towns that serve Whittier torpedoed the new school, which left its future in limbo, and several towns insisted on revisiting the 1967 regional agreement that binds the schools together.

During months of contentious meetings leading up to the vote, Whittier superintendent Maureen Lynch insisted that voting against the new school would cost the district $364 million, because some imminent repairs would trigger a legal requirement to bring the whole building up to current codes, a 10-year process that would ultimately cost nearly $100 million more than new construction.

Since the vote, the project had been in a rare state of quiet until Healey’s surprise announcement on Thursday.

Amesbury Mayor Kassandra Gove, who had also been publicly critical of the enormous cost of the new school, was overjoyed by the potential for the campus merger of the two institutions.

“This may be the best outcome we could have asked for,” Gove said. “We’re not going to be the last vocational district to deal with the huge cost of new construction, and combining these two entities opens up more funding opportunities with a natural partnership that could sufficiently diminish costs while getting a better product.”

Sean Reardon, Newburyport mayor, was the most vocal opponent of the new school’s cost, and the way it was shared under the regional agreement, which divides capital costs by schoolaged children per district, not the number that attend Whittier. Newburyport sends just 29 students to the school but would be required to pay what equals to $68,321 per student, per year for the next 20 years — just for the new building.

But Healey’s announcement filled Reardon with “cautious optimism” for an idea that feels outside the box in Massachusetts but is common in other states.