On Wednesday morning, June 4, a group of about thirty parents, children, construction staff, teachers, City Councilors, and School Committee member Emily Prenner joined Mayor Ruthanne Fuller and School Superintendent Anna Nolin at the long-awaited groundbreaking for the new addition to the Horace Mann School at 225 Nevada Street.
The event marked the end of six years of anger and protest at the removal of the Horace Mann Elementary school community from its much newer building at 687 Watertown Street to the former Carr School — and the fight to have the City remedy inadequacies of the Carr School. The relocation, without community input, had occurred when the Watertown Street building became the site of the Newton Early Childhood Program. Parents, teachers, and children were moved from a school built in 1966 to one built in 1934 that was closed as an elementary school in 1984.
Although the Nevada Street building had been in use for a variety of community activities and was remodeled as a “swing space” school while other schools were undergoing new construction, the classrooms were well below the space requirements of the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA). In addition, the building had the smallest library in the system and inadequate cafeteria space. According to Chris Esmonde, a Horace Mann parent and organizer of the Horace Mann Community Action Committee, the rooms were also extremely noisy and designed for one teacher at the head of the classroom — not conducive to small-group instruction that is the hallmark of today’s classrooms.
Mike Feldstein, a retired Horace Mann teacher, was also instrumental in pushing for a new building. He told Fig City News, “We so appreciate the hard work that many people have done to get us to this point. But let’s not forget that while those most…