HANOVER – Marshfield is one step away from becoming a member of the South Shore Tech region, and another community has also expressed interest in exploring such an opportunity.
The Commissioner of Education approved the amended regional agreement with Marshfield, Superintendent-Director Dr. Thomas J. Hickey reported to the region’s School Committee on Wednesday, July 26.
“[This] is the final step in the lengthy process that all of our communities and the town of Marshfield participated in,” Hickey said. “We’re in the process now … of some paperless method by which we will have a representative from each of our towns sign the document, as well.”
It all becomes official with the commissioner’s signature and all of the amendments will be approved and Marshfield’s membership in the district confirmed, effective July 1, 2024. The amended agreement will be posted on the district website southshore.tech.
Hickey said he also gave a tour SST in mid-July for Pembroke town representatives.
Pembroke formed a regional planning committee at their spring town meeting to “begin the process of having their own conversations about the merits of seeking to join our school district. The committee was made up of Pembroke Public Schools officials, a parent representative and the town manager.
“It was a great conversation,” Hickey said. “They asked a lot of great questions about the process [of joining the region], and about our plans going forward.”
He said the next step would be to activate SST’s regional planning subcommittee should Pembroke wish to pursue the prospect of joining SST.
“I was pleased to be able to have them,” he said.
While it is summertime, Hickey also said the district is “not taking its foot off the accelerator” in its plans to renovate and expand the school.
“Since the close of the school year, we’ve had multiple visioning sessions with our project manager, design team and consultant,” Hickey said. “Visioning sessions are opportunities for parents, students and staff to talk about what we would like to see in a new school. … We’re pushing to think about the design of the school and what we value in the school.”
The visioning sessions were recorded and are being posted on the website: southshoretechproject.com. Hickey said it is typical for school building projects to use a web address separate from a school district.
“You want to house all the important video archives and documentation in one location,” he said. “We will start work with the design team on taking the vision and putting it into an educational plan.”
The School Building Committee will ultimately include that educational plan so the design team can see what the district’s priorities are and begin to put it into various models for the expansion/renovation.
“We’re still a long way off from knowing that we’re going to do this design at this price, however, we should be able to start getting a picture of that close to the end of this calendar year,” he said. “The conversations will become less abstract and the options will become more clear.”
The website will also contain feedback from participants in the visioning sessions.
A series of School Building Committee meeting dates will be posted at a rate of about one per month, from August through December, with the August meeting devoted to what is going into the timeline over the next six months.
School officials and members of the School Building Committee will be making a site visit to Cape Tech in Harwich later in August, as SST’s architectural firm was the firm that built Cape Tech in 2015. A second site visit may be planned for early September.
“If we’re going to talk about how we prioritize what we value, it would nice to be able to set in a structure that represents some of what has probably been adopted by other schools,” Hickey said.
SST has a late September deadline for its first submission to the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA), which will include the educational plan.