Seen up close, the physical defects of the 88-year-old Avery School are hard to miss. Showing visitors a basement classroom in her school, Principal Clare Sullivan puts her hand on a dark green wall – and a bit of brick and mortar falls off.
“The walls, you don’t touch them much, because they start to crumble,” Sullivan says.
Superintendent of Schools June Doe stands by a spot on the floor that has been a consistent problem, thanks to a tributary from Mother Brook that runs underneath.
“The floor starts to rise now, as the water level comes up,” she says.
Take a high water table and add rain, and you get the situation in the girls’ bathroom, where paint is chronically peeling from moisture seeping through the walls, she says. Sullivan points to one wall that was recently re-plastered and sanded. But before it could be painted, the peeling began anew. She says they will try to do the paint job over Christmas.
“It’s not that we leave it that way,” Doe says. “It’s under constant repair.”
From literally crumbling walls to cramped classrooms and workspaces, overburdened circuitry, and hard-to-access bathrooms, the Avery building on High Street is a relic from another educational age, as a recent tour by Sullivan and Doe highlighted. They plan to give more such tours in the weeks ahead, before the project for a new Avery School goes before special Town Meeting next month.
The Massachusetts School Building Authority has awarded Dedham an $11.09 million grant for a new, three-story, 61,000-square-foot Avery that would be built on 5½ acres by Pottery Lane in East Dedham. If Town Meeting members approve an article to fund the school’s construction, the $23.37 million project would go to Dedham voters in a Proposition 2½ debt-exclusion property tax override. The average Dedham homeowner would need to pay about $1,385 toward the school over 21 years, or about $66 per year.
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It remains to be seen whether Dedham taxpayers will want to pay for a new school; in a Dedham Transcript Web poll with a small sample size, 68 percent of respondents said the town should build one, and 32 percent said it should not.
Jennifer Shepherd of Dedham opposes the new elementary school, saying it does need to be so large, that the high school also noticeably needs work, and that taxes have already been increased twice over the past decade for the SMA Fathers and Dedham Middle School projects.
“If this one gets built, then you know the town will be looking at the other ones in town and then they will be getting rebuilt,” she wrote in an e-mail. “I have been a Dedham resident my whole life, and I hope that my kids will stay in Dedham, but the way the town keeps building things and raising taxes the average person is not going to afford living in this town and will be moving to other area towns that are not so expensive.”
What is clear, school officials say, is the current Avery, built in 1921, does not meet modern educational standards. Its classrooms average about 608 square feet, but today’s standards require classrooms be 950 feet, according to the school rehab committee. Andy Lawlor, the school rehab committee’s chairman, says 47 percent of Avery’s 230 students participate in the free or reduced-price breakfast and lunch program, but there is “no cafeteria or kitchen to prepare those meals. And so what happens down there now is Claire has the children eat their breakfast in the hallways next to the laminating machine, because she simply has no other place to put them,” he told the School Committee at its recent meeting.
At lunchtime, each class sends a couple of kids to the basement to pick up lunches.
The school nurse, Sheila Bennett, says she goes one level up to use the sink, as hers does not drain. She says she wants more room for kids to be able to lie down, and some storage space, among other needs. The lighting in her office is rather dim, which is not unusual at the Avery.
“I want a window that doesn’t look over a brick wall, and a bathroom, (which) I don’t have,” Bennett says.
Outside, Avery has a large blacktop playground area – but no grass, which is what kids most often ask for at a new school. Fifth-grader Gregory Pasciuto, 10, says he would like to see grass on the kickball “field.”
One important difference for him between the Avery and other Dedham school buildings is that, as he put it, “in some other schools, there might be bathrooms next to the classroom, rather than go up and down four flights of stairs.”
Asked how the kids deal with such conditions, Sullivan says, “We’re very resilient here.”
“They haven’t experienced anything differently,” Doe says, with Sullivan finishing the thought: “so they don’t realize what they’re missing.”
Dedham Transcript staff writer Edward B. Colby can be reached at 781-433-8336 or ecolby@cnc.com.
