Lynch groundbreaking

WINCHESTER - Now that officials have broken ground, construction can begin on the new Lynch Elementary School, located near Horn Pond and the Woburn line (and reportedly with a new address on Horn Pond Brook Road and not Brantwood Road, even though the building is only moving slightly north of the original one).

In January of 2023, voters overwhelmingly supported a debt-exclusion override for the new school, with 80 percent in favor. The question, which asked residents to “exempt from the provisions of proposition two-and-one-half” the “amounts required to pay for the bonds in order to pay for the costs of the construction of a new Lynch Elementary School,” passed with 2,892 in favor and only 618 against.

In this case, taxpayers should expect to pay $55 per $100,000 of assessed home value or $700 per year for the median home price (about $656.52 for the average home; $779.10 for a home valued at $1.5M). With interest from borrowing, the town will pay $146M in total for the life of the loan and $8.6M starting in FY24.

The total cost is expected to run the town $94M before the Massachusetts School Building Authority reimburses the town approximately $20M.

The original Lynch School building opened some 64 years ago as a junior high school before the town converted it to an elementary school in the 1980s. Before contractors torn it down, School Committee and Education Facilities Planning and Building Committee member Chris Nixon said one of the original boilers still remained.

The new three-story building will house a pre-school with seven classrooms with toilets, a kindergarten with five classrooms with toilets, grades 1 and 2 with five classrooms each, grades 3-5 with four classrooms each, and central science/tech/education space, a regulation gym and teacher planning rooms on each level.

In December of last year, the EFPBC awarded the contract to Brait Construction for $65.7M, sufficiently under the cost estimate enough to accept add alternates plus, with $300,000 in supplemental funding from Free Cash as approved by fall Town Meeting, to add solar panels to the school roof.

Traffic calming

Along with the new elementary school, voters also approved funding for 12 traffic calming projects in surrounding neighborhoods. These projects include intersections on Pond Street, Royal Street, Middlesex Street, and Canal Street and feature curb extensions, new sidewalks, curb ramps, and speed tables.

Construction is set to start this summer and last until next summer (with time off in the winter). By September of 2025, when the new Lynch School is scheduled to open, the work should be complete.

The estimated total actually decreased from $3M to $2.5M with construction projected to cost $1.8M and police details $90,000. A contingency of 25 percent, in the event the project goes over budget, will run the town $450,000 (this way the town doesn’t have to ask Town Meeting for more money).