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NEW BEDFORD — The city’s school superintendent is calling on state and federal partners to step up their support for historically underfunded districts.
Before he defends a new $1 billion investment strategy for the city’s school buildings on Monday, Andrew O’Leary has written a letter stating that an “invisible inequity” has contributed to delayed investment into New Bedford’s public school district.
That inequity: traditional public schools have a much harder time accessing public debt markets than charter, private, or regional public schools such as Voc-Tech or Bristol Aggie.
The result is that charter and regional public schools have taken on and completed large construction projects in recent years, while New Bedford must wait at least another decade to replace its seven 100-year-old elementary schools with four new buildings.
Take Alma Del Mar, for example, the New Bedford-based charter school that was founded in 2011 with only 120 students. It operated out of a “crumbling” and then-vacant school building. By 2015, it won $22 million in financing from MassDevelopment, a state finance agency that provides loans to businesses and nonprofits, to open its first new building. In 2019, the charter began cobbling together more grants and fundraising, and by 2022 it had opened a second brand-new school.
Traditional public schools, O’Leary said, do not have access to many of the funding sources that made those projects possible (including MassDevelopment). But charter schools like Alma do compete for much the same funding available for rebuilding traditional public schools.
New Bedford taxpayers have also contributed to major renovations at regional schools, like Bristol Aggie, though the city’s support wasn’t needed to approve such a project. Bristol Aggie’s $100 million project, originally proposed in 2019, was completed in 2022.
O’Leary contrasts that with the DeValles-Congdon project. New Bedford first proposed a new DeValles-Congdon Elementary in 2019, and the city considers replacing it and other 100-year-old elementary schools a dire need. Though it began the project the same year as Alma and Bristol Aggie’s now-completed schools, New Bedford has yet to put a shovel in the ground.
“The fact that [our] project is clearly the most overdue, and clearly serving students in most need of a modern learning space, reveals much about how public debt and differing governance structures can determine the day-to-day reality faced by our community,” O’Leary previously said to The Light.
In O’Leary’s letter, which was addressed to the City Council’s Finance Committee (which includes all members of the City Council), he wrote, “We remain constrained by the level of available funding and the limited and irregular opportunities to support school construction and renovation.”
Though O’Leary referred to the Massachusetts School Building Authority’s previous partnerships as a “lifeline,” the superintendent said that “state and federal partners can and should do more.”
Despite the last decade of record capital investments in New Bedford, including an “aggressive” commitment to maintenance and renovation, the city’s needs remain great. Only one out of 20 surveyed schools within New Bedford Public Schools were deemed to be in “generally good condition” when the school building authority last did an audit, in 2016. That means at least 19 schools “require[d] moderate to extensive renovations or [were] in poor condition,” the authority found.
(The New Bedford Public Schools system has 26 schools, but the state did not survey them all at the time.)
O’Leary is about one year into his official tenure as the superintendent of New Bedford Public Schools, one of the first public school districts in the country and among the largest in Massachusetts today. On Monday, he’ll defend a strategic plan that calls for a $1 billion investment into new school buildings — which could finally replace New Bedford’s oldest schools with 21st-century buildings.
Email Colin Hogan at chogan@newbedfordlight.org
Editor’s Note: This story was updated to indicate that Andrew O’Leary’s letter was addressed to Finance Committee Members of the City Council. It was not addressed to the School Committee.
Something to look into. When I taught in OKC. OK, there was a program called MAPS that rebuilt the city and the school system by simply adding a penny tax to every dollar spent (OK taxes everything), it isn’t noticed, AND it is not just levied on residents, but anyone who spends money on anything taxable within New Bedford pays the MAPS penny so people passing through also help pay, so tourists who enjoy the city actually contribute to certain projects. The first MAPS rebuilt the down town area, the second fixed up fixable schools and replaced those that needed it, the third is building their light rail system. Each MAPS had a specific goal and only lasted five years. Subsequent MAPS programs had to be voted on by the residents.
It meant they could do all they did without, technically raising people’s regular taxes like property taxes.
Seriously checkout OKC MAPS.