Decision about Concord’s new middle school back on the table in 2025

The main entrance of Rundlett Middle School. GEOFF FORESTER / Monitor file
Published: 12-29-2024 12:00 PM |
The online petition that started it all — calling for the school board to rescind its vote to move the middle school — has officially declared victory.
The Concord Concerned Citizens, the group of residents who organized around their outrage to the school board’s vote to relocate the middle school to East Concord, have succeeded at every step along the way: two school district charter amendments they wrote and put on the ballot this fall passed easily.
The group’s end goal, however, was never about signatures or charter amendments. They wanted the Concord School Board to rescind the earlier vote and choose to rebuild its middle school at the current Rundlett site.
That hasn’t happened.
The Concord School Board is still mulling its options for what to do with the middle school project. While rebuilding a middle school at Rundlett seems more likely than it did a year ago, decisions about the project’s path in the next year will prove pivotal, and stand to define the future of Concord’s middle school for generations.
To recap: After the board declined to reconsider its decision in Dec. 2023 to relocate the middle school to the city’s East Side, the Concord Concerned Citizens drafted charter amendments aimed at forcing the question back open. The state signed off on the legality of the amendments, and then the group succeeded in collecting sufficient signatures to place their charter amendments on the ballot. On election day, voters overwhelmingly approved them.
Notably, the school board’s attorney has said that if it wanted to continue developing its project on the raw land next to the Broken Ground school, the charter amendments — which require the school board to get voter approval any time it wants to relocate a district school — wouldn’t bind it retroactively. But in discussions so far about what to do next, board members haven’t shown any appetite to do that.
The board is now weighing a smorgasbord of potential futures for the school: do they do an about-face and hit the gas on plans to rebuild Rundlett where it is? Do they take the amendments literally, and put the location directly and explicitly before the voters? If they go that route, do they wait for November city elections or pay for a special one? Do they walk back plans entirely and simply renovate the current middle school building?
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The next year — more likely, the next few months — will reveal the project’s future and how much it might cost.
The tension over this issue made it one of the Monitor’s top local stories of 2024. As the school board charged ahead with its designs for the new school, constituents appeared at every board meeting to question the cost, the process, and the lack of comparative information between the two sites. Lawn signs proliferated. Candidates jumped into a school board race to champion the issue.
When it became clear that the proposed charter amendments would be on the ballot this past November, the whole team at the Monitor dove into a comprehensive series. In “Rethinking Rundlett,” we polled residents about how they felt about the middle school and how they thought it should be handled. We reflected on how Rundlett came to be 70 years ago. We talked to teachers about the pressures of the project on their ability to educate. We reached out to members of the community who had been left out of the conversation. We tried, somewhat unsuccessfully, to get a closer look at the costs.
As debates heated up and the election drew nearer, many teachers and parents expressed simply wanting a new school ASAP — regardless of where it would go. They enter 2025 no closer to getting one than they did 2024.
Progress on the middle school project, which first started discussions in the late 2010s, has been far from linear. For a few years, delivering education remotely during a global pandemic took the district’s full focus. Then, both a partnership and a property purchase eyed for the new school fell through in 2023.
The 2025 school board will have to, again, chart a new path forward.
Catherine McLaughlin can be reached at cmclaughlin@cmonitor.com. You can follow her on X @cat_mclaugh and subscribe to her newsletter The City Beat at concordmonitor.com.