The Best Schools 2008

In leafy Newton, the townsfolk have long been infected by a particularly potent strain of education lust. But now, with a $200 million high school tearing the city apart, it's more than merely a reputation for great education that's at stake. It's the future of Newton as we know it.

By Jason Schwartz

The neighbors might have thought Jeff Seideman was having a dinner party. Why else, on an ice-cold night in February, would 10 cars be parked outside his brick Colonial in Newtonville?

Seideman, a slightly paunchy, bald-on-top fellow with a bushy blond mustache, greeted his guests just inside the mudroom and ushered them into the dining room. Shedding heavy jackets, they crowded around the lacquered wooden table, took seats, and introduced themselves. Many had never met before, and certainly none had come for the food (though Seideman had laid out Doritos and ginger ale). Instead, they came because they were united in a common belief—that the Newton North High School project, now priced at $195.2 million, had become an unmitigated disaster.

In fighting the beast, the group's primary tactic—as made clear by the agendas Seideman distributed—would be to defeat a tax hike proposed by Newton Mayor David Cohen. Under Massachusetts' infamous Proposition 2½, cities and towns are able to raise property taxes only 2½ percent annually; for anything more, a so-called override referendum is needed. Cohen had warned that without the extra cash, the next year's budget would fall $8.6 million short, forcing funding cuts to the school system. But as far as this group was concerned, Cohen wasn't to be trusted. In the seven years since the idea of building a new high school had been floated, the cost of the project had nearly tripled. It was about time, they figured, that Newton tightened its belt.

As the group discussed strategy, they barely noticed Seideman's daughter, then a junior at North, slide through a hallway and scurry upstairs to her bedroom, where stacks of schoolbooks were waiting for her. It made for a strange scene: high school daughter upstairs with her books; dad and friends downstairs, plotting to cut off money for schools. In Newton, of all places.

Then again, Newton isn't quite what it seems anymore. While things in the suburb may appear as idyllic as ever, look a little closer and you see pockmarked streets, crumbling municipal buildings, and outdated, deteriorating equipment. Not too long ago, busted shocks on a 26-year-old fire truck sent it into retirement—right after it slammed into a pothole, injuring a firefighter sitting in back. The maxed-out budget just forced the city to eliminate 13 positions from its police force, shutter its four branch libraries, and slash its road paving, sidewalk maintenance, and snowplowing budgets. But in a city like Newton—the place people move to for the schools—none of that stings quite like the recent elimination of 79 school jobs, about half belonging to teachers. The slap-in-the-face irony, of course, is that the cutbacks came even as the city was sinking those 200 million bucks into the Taj Mahal of a high school rising on Walnut Street.

With its professional-grade auditorium (in addition to the theater one room over), 4,000-square-foot student-run restaurant, and indoor track, the new school has been ripped by critics as a testament to educational excess. Slated to open in September 2010, it was designed by the world-class architectural firm of Graham Gund, which is renowned as much for its work at museums and universities as for its propensity for sketching pricey blueprints. Though Gund's portfolio includes designs for the Taft School in Connecticut, New York's tony Horace Mann School, and Concord Academy, Newton North is only its second public high school.

In his dining room last winter, Seideman and his guests (who chose to name their group Newton for Fiscal Responsibility) were riled by more than merely the glass and steel edifice (which one attendee deemed "retarded"). They were angry at Cohen (a "schmuck"). They had had it with the city's 24-member city council, the board of aldermen (one member was labeled a "puss-face," another declared "dead from the neck up"). And they were upset with their neighbors ("so dense"), who instinctively approve anything "for the kids" without ever considering the consequences. Seideman, a levelheaded former teacher, waxing rhetorical, proposed one way Cohen could fix the city's mess. "Cut back on the school project," he said. "If you don't want to do it, then you, Mr. Mayor, are choosing between bricks and students."

More than anything, it's the windows that tell the story of how the new high school got so expensive. The problem starts with the old Newton North, a hulking red-brick colossus built in 1973 and regretted ever since. Students complain plenty about interloping mice, but the number one gripe revolves around a lack of views of the outside world. Several classrooms nestled deep inside the fortresslike building simply don't have any windows at all—which makes the learning environment glum and the ventilation poor.

Mayor Cohen, who's been the driving force behind the construction of the new school, says the dearth of windows was a mistake worth correcting. There were others, of course (for one, the school's temperamental HVAC system), and by the turn of the millennium, just about everyone in town figured either a major renovation or a whole new school was in order. In 2004, when those two options were still being weighed, Cohen wisely went ahead and grabbed $46.6 million in state funds, along with assurances that the city could use the money for either. Cohen's timing was impeccable: A month later, the state shifted control of financing for school projects to the newly created Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA), a stricter regime that would report to the state treasurer. Today, Katherine Craven, who directs the agency, doubts Newton would've gotten the state money had it waited. "We might have suggested to fix the HVAC system and not done anything more with them," she says.

With the cash in hand, Cohen pressed ahead with a plan for a new building—which brings us back to the desire for windows, a seemingly small request that ended up dictating the entire design of the school. "The most important lesson that we learned from [the old] building is that every learning space in the new building will have access to natural light," says Cohen. The easiest way to accomplish that noble goal might have been to go tall, creating a relatively compact, multistory building. Unfortunately, anything too high—the building will be four stories as it is—would loom over the suburban neighborhood like a mini skyscraper, agitating the neighbors. So the architects decided the school would have to be built in a zigzag configuration that allowed every classroom to face out. Such snaking layouts, though, can inflate costs in surprising ways. According to Craven, the roof for Newton North will cost 50 percent more than the average for other recently completed schools—largely because, well, all that zigzagging requires an awful lot of roof.

Many of the windows slated to be installed in the new building will be large, lovely, floor-to-ceiling numbers. In the long run, those big panes may save Newtonites a bit on energy costs (more sunshine equals less electricity to power the lights) and lead to optimally cheery classrooms, but they won't be cheap. According to the MSBA's study of the building's costs, Newton will spend about two and a half times what other schools have for windows, largely because of the price of installation. "If a window's small enough, one laborer can put it in," says Craven. "If you go up another size, you need two people."

Incredulous that nobody in town ever took heed of this point, Craven muses that decision-makers in Newton simply must have set out to build the school they desired—or figured they deserved—while giving little thought to the final price tag. Newton North, the most expensive school in state history, is on pace to cost $112,686 per student, whereas comparable projects in Quincy and Chicopee come in at $84,511 and $67,073 per student, respectively. Lincoln-Sudbury Regional High School, completed in 2004, cost just $46,188 per pupil. Granted, things like the rising cost of steel and gas have driven up costs, but the project was always a whopper. The new Newton North, says state Treasurer Tim Cahill, is "not only slightly on the high end. It's way out on the high end."