Whittier Fails to Solve Disagreements
With Enrollment Caps, Towns Feel Abused, Paying Top Dollar for Few Students as City of Haverhill Takes Lions Share of Seats
REGIONAL – The planned meeting between the North Shore legislative delegation and a key school committee for the future of the Whittier Regional Vocational Technical High School was postponed indefinitely because the committee members from the district’s 11 cities and towns are so divided.
The Regional Agreement Amendment Committee (RAAC) is charged with creating a new governing document among the cities and towns in the Whittier district. Without that agreement that all the municipalities have to approve, the school cannot move forward with plans to build or relocate a new high school.
Committee Chair and West Newbury Town Manager Angus Jennings described the meeting on April 15 as so “fractious” that he decided to postpone the meeting with the legislators, who ultimately will decide the school’s future.
None of the other committee members disagreed with his assessment.
“We need a clear and concise message,” Jennings told the committee last week. “Until we have that, a meeting with the legislators would be counterproductive.”
The May meeting last week showed sprouts of agreement. Jennings, who is leaving in July as West Newbury’s Town Manager to become the Whittier business manager, said he was more encouraged that the RACC was less divided, but the thorny issues, which need to be resolved in the next two or three meetings, are far from resolved.
Without the new agreement, the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA), which could fund as much as half of the new high school, will not move forward.
Several cities and towns want changes in the agreement to allocate operating and capital improvement costs to reflect the number of students sent from each.
More than half of Whittier students come from Haverhill, but the city would pay only 44 percent of the municipalities’ share of the cost of any construction. Rowley, on the other hand, would pay 3.5 per cent of the cost and Newburyport would pay 10.5 percent.
When Jennings posted several questions to the members, there was a consensus that Whittier should move to the Northern Essex Community College campus, rather than renovate and repair the existing high school or build its own building on its Haverhill campus.
There was unanimous agreement that Whittier should continue to educate students.
But there was a major split on several thorny issues.
For example, seven members of the committee voted that the new Whittier governing body should have one representative for towns and two for cities. Three members voted for having only one member from each municipality, but their votes would be weighed to give the larger communities more clout. Five members voted for having one representative per municipality with no weighing.
In this poll, the members were not limited to one vote.
The RAAC members were also divided on how funding should be divided for Whittier’s operations and construction.
The good news for RAAC is that Whittier could share NECC classrooms and athletic fields, which would reduce costs as Whittier and NECC would share those facilities under memoranda. ♦
