Blackstone Valley

12:20 PM EDT on Monday, June 6, 2005

By CYNTHIA NEEDHAM
Journal Staff Writer

Until 1913, Woonsocket students attended one of the city's primary schools until they graduated or left to go to work in local mills.

That fall, the city opened a concrete and mortar high school at Villa Nova Park, the site now known as Woonsocket Middle School.

As the Great Depression set in at the end of the 1920s, a brick junior high school was added to the back of that building. It was a separate school that literally clung to its older brother.

The new school cost $850,000 and was built to accommodate 1,200 sixth, seventh, eighth and ninth graders who flooded the schools as Woonsocket's post-war population grew.

Old photos of the junior/senior high school site look much the same as the scene you'd see there today. The windows, the steps, the facades -- everything but the students' dress -- is almost an exact replica of what it looked like 90 years ago.

In 1972, the city built what is still referred to as the "new" high school on Cass Avenue.

The junior high school, which had by then swelled to more than 1,500 students, expanded into the rest of the building and eventually revamped itself as a middle school, moving its ninth graders to the high school in the 1990s.

Woonsocket's centennial history book, published in 1988, looks back at the school's history and describes the junior high of the 1970s as confronting the same problems it currently faces.

"One of Supt. John F. Drury's areas of concern was the Woonsocket Junior High School, the largest junior high school in New England during the 1970s, full of discipline difficulties," the passage reads.

Nearly 30 years later, not much has changed.

Remarkably, sound construction and proper maintenance make the building appear well-kept, its hallways clean. But that doesn't change the fact that it is simply too old and too poorly laid out to educate an entire city's population of middle school-age children.

With basement storage areas used as airless classrooms and some hallways so narrow that students must walk single file to pass through them, this building is well past its prime.

As it has been for years, the city is looking to construct a new building and struggling to find the money -- and the space -- with which to do it.

The best chance may lie with the proposed Municipal Economic Development Zone, a reduced-tax retail complex that could funnel as much as $30 million into the city in its first decade of operation.

Mayor Susan D. Menard has made no secret of putting a new middle school at the top of her wish list if the city ever sees those profits that she would combine with state reimbursement money for new school construction.

The new school, the mayor has said, would likely be located across town at Barry Field and built to accommodate one-half the middle school population. It would cost about $40 million to build.

Under Menard's plan, the current middle school would be renovated, with parts of it torn down to make way for a schoolyard and parking lot that would help develop a more "livable" school environment, city administrators say.

Another scenario would designate the Barry Field site as the city's high school and convert the current high school into a second middle school.

But these plans are contingent on the creation of the MED Zone and with vocal opposition taking hold, there's no guarantee there will be a MED Zone at all.

Even if the MED Zone goes through, construction of a new school might not even start for almost a decade, meaning a child born in Woonsocket today is almost guaranteed to be educated at the current Woonsocket Middle School, just as his grandparents, great-grandparents and even great-great grandparents were.