Some Somerville students to be relocated
Students at the Winter Hill Community Innovation School in Somerville will attend classes in alternative locations for the rest of the school year as officials determine what repairs are needed after a nonstructural piece of concrete fell in a stairwell last week, officials said Monday.
At a City Hall news conference, Mayor Katjana Ballantyne of Somerville said students were being relocated “out of an abundance of caution,” and classes will resume Thursday.
“Let me first acknowledge we understand that this incident is challenging [and] frustrating for our students, teachers and families,” she said. “Closing the school as we did on Friday or shifting locations for the remainder of the last 11 days of the school year is something we never want for our students, teachers or families.”
A program for students with autism will be moved to the first floor of the Edgerly Building at 8 Bonair St.; prekindergarten and kindergarten will move to the Capuano Early Childhood Center at 150 Glen St.; and grades 1 through 8 will move to Tufts University’s Olin Hall at 180 Packard Ave. in Medford.
On Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday the city will offer recreation programming for all Winter Hill students from 7:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. at the Founders Memorial skating rink, Ballantyne said.
Since Thursday, school officials had been “all hands on deck finalizing the contingency plans for the remainder of the school year,” Ballantyne said.
School officials said the concrete fell in the school’s north stairwell while the building was empty. When they discovered the fallen concrete, staff immediately closed the stairwell and brought in a structural engineer for a review. Public works employees made minor repairs.
Rich Raiche, the city’s director of infrastructure and asset management, said ceiling tiles have been taken down all over the school and a review of what happened will continue this week, he said.
“The investigations to date have not raised any concerns about the structural integrity of the building,” Raiche said at the news conference.
Raiche said engineers are going to pull some of the concrete apart to gain a better understanding of what happened.
Uma Murugan, president of the parent-teacher association at the school, where her child is a third-grader, described the situation as “utter chaos.”
“We’re all scrambling,” she said. “The school needs to be razed and rebuilt. It’s way overdue.”
Parents and teachers voiced their concerns about the school’s condition during a city Finance Committee meeting Monday night on Zoom. More than 350 people logged in for the meeting, a budget hearing, with dozens calling for the city to build a new Winter Hill school. Many blamed city officials for allowing the building to fall into disrepair and questioned what will happen when the next school year begins.
In a statement released Friday, the Somerville Educators Union said the school has dealt with floods, leaks, falling ceiling tiles, rodent infestations, broken windows, an HVAC system that doesn’t work, and a broken elevator, among other problems.
“The continued disregard for the school — and our students’ needs — is frustrating, and we’re at a critical point with this emergency closure,” said Kara Dodd, a special education teacher.
Courtney Koslow said her third-grade daughter has been attending the school since prekindergarten. She said parents and faculty have been raising the alarm about the school’s condition for more than a year.
“We absolutely love Winter Hill; the community at the school is fantastic, but from the very beginning, that building has been a very big, glaring problem for the school,” Koslow said. “It’s something that has become a much more obvious issue over the last few years.”
Brendan Buckland, a dean of students for the school and building representative with the teachers union, said students and staff face the challenges brought on by the school’s aging structure daily.
“The way the kids talk about this, they say their school is trash, or they say it’s ‘mid,’ you know, they use their own language to describe the condition,” he said. “When they look around their school compared to others, it’s not as nice. It’s not the oldest school in the district; it was just built cheaply in the ’70s, and it’s coming apart.”