NAHANT — With plans to renovate the Council on Aging’s (COA) kitchen exceeding their expected costs, the town is exploring a new option — moving its COA center to the Johnson School’s library.
Town Administrator Tony Barletta presented the idea to the School Committee this week, noting that the plan is still in its early stage. Although the town has allocated roughly $50,000 in state-matched Community Preservation Act funding toward the kitchen renovation in the COA’s Tiffany Room, Barletta said the cost estimates were so high that it would make more sense to consider alternative venues.
Since the Johnson School is used as Nahant’s emergency shelter, Barletta said the location would make an ideal venue for a COA center. He added that the town has already brought architects to the school for initial inspections.
“If we needed to activate a shelter, we would utilize the school as our location. If it was a high-heat situation, a flood situation, or a bad winter storm, we might need to have a shelter. So if we did venture down this road, installing a kitchen in the space next to the cafeteria that would be able to serve both programs and be utilized during an emergency situation like that would be another benefit for the town,” Barletta said.
When School Committee Chair Patricia Parras asked Barletta about the project’s estimated timeline, he responded that in the event of the project’s logistics coming together smoothly, he expected the renovations to start during the summer of 2025 at the earliest.
Committee member Beth Anderson said that while she thinks the potential project could create a venue for intergenerational learning with seniors and children, a lot of planning would be needed to accommodate the unique needs of two vastly different age groups in the same building.
“There’s some mindset-shifting culture work that you would have to do as a school, when it all of a sudden serves an additional purpose. It is a different thing when there is a pre-K to sixth-grade elementary school running around with teachers and educators. It’s another when you also add in the needs of a high-functioning powerful elder community,” Anderson said.
Barletta responded that while the project would have to be planned thoroughly, the town envisions that seniors and students would dine separately.
In response to Superintendent of Schools Tony Pierantozzi’s concerns about parking, Barletta said if the town goes forward with this plan, it will undertake a comprehensive parking study in advance.
“The nice thing about where the library is, it has its own separate entrance… Usually the Council on Aging guests aren’t showing up to the Tiffany Room until late morning after the school day has already started, so it wouldn’t interfere with the typical pickup and drop-off schedules of the school day,” Barletta said.
In the next few months, Barletta said the town will share a high-level conceptual design with a construction estimator before circling back to share the design with the School Committee.
“If we’re going to invest this much into the Council on Aging, you know, maybe we should be thinking about investing it into a space that’s going to better serve them and potentially better serve the school,” Barletta said.
