"are there enough people who understand the need for a school?"

The Boston Globe West captures the high school building project in part by writing:

The complexity of the current building would make renovations very invasive to the school day, officials said. With 19 different roof lines and walls primarily lined with cinder block, construction workers couldn’t possibly refurbish the school in a discreet manner. 

“We would literally have to rip apart the walls to get to the plumbing,’’ said Sabolinski. 

As the building committee conducted a feasibility study, it discovered that renovations would also prove very costly. In a budget document released to the public in March, the committee revealed that an extensive renovation would cost $97.9 million before state reimbursement. In the same document, the projection for a model school stood at $91.6 million. But the state allocates an additional 5 percent to the total reimbursement of the model school project, which lowers the final town cost to just under $40 million. 

For years the committee debated the renovation-rebuilding quandary, until the scales tipped decidedly last month when the Massachusetts School Building Authority indicated that it would probably invite Franklin to join its model school program. A quasi-independent government agency, the state authority aims to streamline public school building projects throughout the Commonwealth.

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