Peabody to join voke school merger

PEABODY – After more than a decade of waiting and a night filled with heated debate, the Peabody City Council voted 8-3 in favor of joining the planned regional vocational school merger on Thursday.The city council found it difficult to reach a decision on the matter, even after the school committee voted 5-1 in favor of the merger on Nov. 10. Peabody is the largest of the 17 communities that must decide by Dec. 15 whether or not to send students to the new school.The state has pledged close to $100 million from the Massachusetts School Building Authority and Gov. Deval Patrick to help fund the school’s construction, with the 17 communities being asked to pay the remaining $31.2 million.”It’s taken us 12 years to get this $100 million and no one else in the state is getting this kind of money,” said State Representative Theodore C. Speliotis, who represents Danvers. “This is the only time in your political career that you will be able to vote to build a new school and know exactly what you are paying for it.”Despite a vehement endorsement from Speliotis, councilors debated a multitude of issues with joining the merger, including financial uncertainty, political control and how the merger could affect non-vocational students. The cost of sending students to the school would vary based on how many choose to enroll at the regional voke each year.”It’s a bit of a Ponzi scheme, the idea that your budget grows and grows,” said Ward 3 Councilor Rico E. Mello. “What happens if we say no to a new bond, when they come to us to expand the school in a few years and other communities vote for it? Then we have to pay.”Mello proposed amendments to the original motion to approve the voke merger that would let the citizens of Peabody vote on the matter in a referendum. He also made a motion to not approve the voke merger and have Mayor Michael J. Bonfanti pass an $8.4 million bond to renovate Peabody Veterans Memorial High School to house a vocational school. The mayor supported the merger.”The mayor is the one person who has the authority to issue a bond and if he had said to us, ‘look, you can have the choice of a new vocational school at Peabody or this (merger),’ we’d be having a heck of a lot of a different debate right now,” Councilor-at-Large David C. Gravel said. “Would I like to have a voke school at the current grounds of our high school? Absolutely. Would that happen if the $8 million is not proposed by anybody who has the authority to do so at this meeting? Absolutely not.”Ward 2 Councilor Arthur Athas said he agreed the merger was too expensive at face value, but hoped that with the support of Salem, the second-lar-gest community involved, Peabody could play the biggest role in future administrative and financial decisions. Salem will vote on the merger tonight.”When things come before us, we have to snap, we have to grab and I think with the legislature offering close to $100 million of financing to build this new voke school, that is significant, especially given the economy that we have,” Arthur Athas said. “I have optimism that further down the road? we’ll be able to control everything that happens with this voke.”After the other 10 councilors sounded off on their individual support or concerns, City Council president Barry C. Sinewitz voiced his fiscal concerns for both the current school budget and for the future. He also said he hopes a vote in favor of the merger would not hinder the discussed $40 million renovation to the Higgins School that is long overdue.”It’s clear that everybody here appreciates a vocational education, I don’t know why for the past 10 years nothing has been done to improve the situation,” Sinewitz said. “But I’m a bottom line guy and to me it’s clearly not fiscally responsible for this city.”The merger would close North Shore Technical High School and Essex Aggie to form the new school and is planned to open in 2013. The school would enroll 1,440 students, up to 175 from Peabody, at a 380,000 square-