City leaders, school committee members and Holyoke residents gathered at the future home of the district’s new middle school Friday, taking part in a groundbreaking ceremony on the grounds of the former William R. Peck Middle School.
Before a sign showcasing renderings for the facility, officials like Holyoke Mayor Joshua Garcia shoveled dirt where, just a couple months prior, he and others were cheering as the first pieces of Peck came down.
The $85.5 million dollar project was approved back in June 2023, with demolition work on Peck starting soon afterward.
On Friday, Holyoke Receiver and Superintendent Anthony Soto told the crowd that the project, in some form, goes back to 2013.
"Finally, it's becoming a reality,” he said. “Today marks a big step forward towards offering a well-designed, well-lit, engaging learning environment for middle school students - about 550 of them."
Built in 1973, the Peck school served as many as 645 students at one point across grades 4-8.
But according to Holyoke School Committee Vice Chair Erin Brunelle, the facility left a lot to be desired for some time.
On its webpage detailing the project, the city went as far as to call the building “poorly designed” and energy inefficient towards the end
Brunelle, who has a child in middle school, told WAMC that the presence of asbestos and other materials didn’t help anything, either.
“It was, I mean, full of asbestos, lead paint, probably mold - it lacked natural light, windows didn't function,” Brunelle told WAMC. “The school was poorly designed from the beginning, I went to Peck School myself.”
The vice chair says after being involved in the city’s tours and studies of Peck, bringing down the building took a massive burden off of the city’s shoulders.
The specific plans to replace Peck, though, didn’t come easy.
Some five years ago, at the recommendation of the Massachusetts School Building Authority, officials moved to have two new middle schools built – a proposition Brunelle said the city couldn’t afford at the time.
The move also required a tax override, which voters soundly rejected during the 2019 municipal elections.
Half-a-decade later, though, with the MSBA reimbursing the city for over $58 million of the $85.5 million project, no override is in the mix.
“It’s been a lot of work to get us to this point, in order to bring a lot of different people together, both financially as well as community energy-wise, to get this and get the ear of the people that we needed to get to with the state, in order to give us the proper funding for this school,” Holyoke City Councilor At Large Kevin Jourdain told WAMC at the groundbreaking. “Luckily, after all of that work, we pulled it together.”
According to Brunelle, the first metal beams for the school are expected to go up in April. Construction is slated to go on for at least a year-and-a-half, with plans to open the middle school to students for fall 2025.
The vice chair added that while signage refers to the project as “The New William R. Peck Middle School,” the city is exploring a potential renaming.
