MARBLEHEAD — The town may replace three aging schools with a new building at the site of the current Malcolm L. Bell School on Baldwin Road.
The Gerry School Building Committee on Thursday voted unanimously to recommend the 6.4-acre Bell site for the new building over two other options that would have been located at the current site of the Bud Orne Playground.
School Committee chairwoman Meredith Tedford said her board was attending the meeting to fully understand the decision made by the building committee.
The School Committee will discuss the proposal at a meeting on Thursday at 7 p.m. at the Marblehead High School Library.
The town is working with the Massachusetts School Building Authority, a quasi-independent government authority that helps fund the construction of school buildings, to construct a new elementary school that would combine and replace the Elbridge Gerry, L.H. Coffin, and Bell elementary schools.
At Thursday’s meeting, Architect Gene Raymond of Raymond Design Associates, Inc. presented two potential layout options for a school on the Bud Orne property, which is more than 3.5 acres in size, and one for the Bell property. The building committee narrowed 22 potential sites down to the two options at a previous meeting.
The smaller Bud Orne site would have required the 86,000-square-foot school to be taller, and studies showed the proposed three-story building would have cast shadows on more than a dozen homes, including one that would have been blocked from sunlight all day.
Committee member Ben Berman thanked Raymond for presenting an additional option for the Bud Orne site.
“It was very important we looked at Bud at every angle possible,” said Berman. “We exhausted every angle of Bud and the message we’ve sent is that we tried everything to make it work.”
Superintendent Maryann Perry said she hoped the Bud Orne site would be a good fit, but ultimately supported the Bell option.
“I so wanted the school to be on the Bud Orne site,” said Perry. “I felt it was the opportunity for three schools to come together with a new identity. I imagined a sprawling campus with open grounds.”
But after learning that at least one residence would be blocked from sunlight all day long and seeing the potential traffic complications, among other factors, she decided to support the Bell proposal.
“Educationally, Bell is the site that, as a superintendent, I picked,” she said.
If approved, building on the Bell site will require demolition of the Lower and Upper Bell Elementary School buildings.
Students were moved out of the Gerry School in January following a steam pipe leak. First graders were moved to Coffin Elementary School and kindergarteners to Lower Bell Elementary School.
The Gerry building was constructed in 1906 and is the oldest of the town’s schools. Perry recommended at an earlier meeting that the school be closed permanently, but School Committee members have not yet taken that vote.
The price tag for the school will not be determined until after building committee members agree on building size and other factors.
