The Burlington School Board is considering 12 locations for a new, permanent high school.
It would replace the former high school, which had to be closed after cancer-causing chemicals were detected in the building. The school district abandoned the building because remediation would have been exorbitantly expensive.
The district has leased the former Macy’s department store in downtown Burlington for three and a half years, and spent $3.5 million to renovate it as the temporary high school.
Working with White + Burke Real Estate Advisors, the board expects to select priority sites early next month, board members said at a meeting Tuesday.
The goal is to get students into a new, permanent location by August 2025, Superintendent Tom Flanagan said.
The high school closed in September when dangerous levels of PCBs, cancer-causing chemicals, were found in the building’s foundation, window caulking and soil. In some areas, levels exceeded state and federal limits.
Project Manager Joe Weith told the board 16 sites were considered in the search for a new high school location, but four were eliminated early on. He did not disclose the eliminated sites.
The 16 sites under consideration, including the four that have since been eliminated:
- 345 Pine St. (former Vermont Transit property currently used by the Burlington Farmers Market)
- 453/501 Pine St. (next to the Barge Canal Superfund site)
- Centennial Field (owned by the University of Vermont and home field for the Lake Monsters baseball team)
- Champlain Elementary/Burlington School District facilities at 800 Pine St.
- The former Macy’s and the long-stalled CityPlace commercial development along Church Street
- The huge dirt pit where CityPlace has been proposed
- CP Smith Elementary School and Schifilliti Park in the North End
- Elks Club property near Institute Road
- The Gateway Block on Main Street between South Union and South Winooski streets
- Either side of Institute Road, where the old high school was located (which are being considered as two separate locations)
- Lakeside Avenue/Sears Lane (across the street from the Innovation Center)
- Leddy Park in the New North End
- Rock Point, near the closed high school
- The former Sisters of Mercy Catholic convent near the University of Vermont
- An urban reserve near the Lake Champlain Sailing Center
“We performed a high-level evaluation of each of those sites,” Weith said, based on a set of criteria developed in his work with school districts.
Those criteria include city and community support, accessibility, bus transit, land acquisition costs, zoning and potential environmental risk. Each criterion is weighted from two to five points, and the score for each site will determine its numeric ranking.
A variety of key assumptions steered the search, Weith said: There must be enough space for a building between 275,000 and 300,000 square feet, and there must be at least 8 acres for suburban locations and at least 2 to 2.5 acres for downtown, urban locations.
There should be no cost to obtain or use city-owned property, and “redevelopment of former high school property assumes full remediation to safe [and] acceptable standards,” the presentation states.
Weith said if the board ultimately selects an Institute Road location, where the former high school is located, on-site remediation for PCBs will be needed. If another site is selected, the Institute Road property will be sold in its current condition and buyers will be responsible for remediation.
The school board’s finance and facilities committee are expected to review the evaluations and propose a recommendation for the board. The board is scheduled to decide which sites will advance to the next phase on Sept. 7.
