And speaking of school buildings in Worcester

The Worcester School Committee's Finance and Operations subcommittee met yesterday with the City Council's education committee to talk about the long-awaited facilities report (yes, that's a link to the report online; it's up!). I caught a bit of it in the car (tweets here) and was caught by the new discussion of possible mergers of elementary schools...
...as was T&G reporter Scott O'Connell, thus this morning's headline.
Note, though, that as much as the consultant did seem rather taken with this notion of mergers, this was less about that, and more about Worcester having (not news to us) a lot of old buildings and smaller schools. If those need major rehab, such that new buildings would make more sense, we (and MSBA) aren't going to build on the same plan. New buildings have cafeterias and space for special ed and follow modern specs around light and air and such. And they're bigger.

And yes, that's my way of telling you not to freak out over mergers. And, as noted in the article:

While Mr. Allen said district administrators have not begun planning any such school consolidations yet, he noted Worcester went through a similar contraction several decades ago. In response to a committee question about how families might react to losing their school to a possible merger, Mr. Allen said, “If you can show parents what you can get with a larger, newer school,” the School Department hopefully will be able to earn community buy-in.

Worcester isn't new to school mergers. And unlike other places, it hasn't been our less vocal, more poor, more of color sections of the city that have lost schools.

Don't lose sight of the main point here, though: We have a massive backlog of needed renovation and repairs at our schools. That's on the city capital budget (and, more broadly, it's on the state's foundation funding, in terms of maintenance).
What are we going to do about that, Worcester?