Nauset Elementary Schools Awarded Efficiency Grant

Brewster, Orleans and Eastham have been awarded a $150,000 grant through the Massachusetts Community Compact Cabinet’s Efficiency and Regionalization program to study the Nauset Regional School District elementary schools.

The grant will cover investigation into key areas such as  “enrollment trends, operating expenses, and capital needs of the district’s elementary schools, as well as the middle school,” according to a press release from Brewster’s Town Manager Peter Lombardi. 

This is the second time the towns applied for the competitive grant. After the first application was denied, Brewster town meeting appropriated $100,000, Orleans committed $50,000 and Eastham approved $25,000. Brewster authorized the most funding because it has around 50 percent of the pre-K through eighth grade population in the district. If the grant funding covers the consultant fully, which according to Lombardi is very likely, the funding will return to each town. 

Lombardi submitted the application on behalf of the district and town select boards with a scope including Brewster’s two elementary schools and middle school, Orleans’ elementary school and Eastham’s elementary school. It comes amid steadily declining enrollment rates and the need to make decisions on significant capital expenditures to upgrade the Orleans and Brewster elementary schools. 

Brewster approved a code compliance study in 2023 for Stony Brook Elementary which is scheduled to start in early 2025. Habeeb and Associates have just been contracted to complete the study. Additionally, the building needs a new roof and HVAC system, which is projected to cost around $13 million. Last year, the Orleans Elementary School completed a similar study that reported $44 million in renovation costs or $55 million to build new. 

The efficiency grant will fund a comprehensive, pre-feasibility study that will “provide actionable data to help the towns and Nauset school district make informed decisions about potential regionalization, consolidation, or other measures to improve school operational efficiency and reduce costs while maintaining the district’s high educational standards,” according to the application. 

Officials say the school budgets are increasing at an unsustainable rate when compared to enrollment statistics. In 2023, total enrollment for all elementary schools in the district was approximately 850 students, compared to more than 1,400 students in 2000. 

Many towns have had to approve tax overrides to support increased operating costs at the schools. 

The $150,000 will cover the cost of a consultant to complete five key steps. The first will be a physical and educational assessment of the buildings related to facilities planning, capacity determinations, space requirements and adequacy of the facilities. The second will provide data surrounding operating expenses, staffing levels, student-to-teacher ratios, enrollment trends, programmatic needs, facility utilization, building conditions, technology infrastructure, capital expenditures and student transportation systems. The third will look at identifying efficiencies within the schools, and the fourth will analyze consolidation and/or regionalization efforts. In a final step, the consultant will produce a report that is to be presented to town and school leaders. 

“We will be working with both the schools and other towns to really do some data gathering and understanding of what our options are and how feasible they may be so we can then use that to inform next steps,” Lombardi said at a recent Brewster select board meeting. “We talked about this in terms of a first step in a process, although I don’t think the report will necessarily point us in one direction, we’ll have to follow the data.” 

The complete project timeline will take around 14 months, likely to start in early 2025 and with a final report expected in 2026.