Earlier this week, the Wallingford Board of Education approved a motion to move forward with a plan to consolidate two high schools in town into one.
According to commentary at the virtual meeting Monday night, the new high school voted on by the board with an 8-1 margin would be nearly 300,000 square feet and would take residence at Lyman Hall’s current property
"They have a whole vo-ed program at Lyman Hall and it would be nice to consolidate and also have that option for my son too," Kelly Wolfe, a parent of a sophomore, said.
The projected cost would be around $216 million, with the town's share of that being $122 million with the state to reimburse the town, but not everyone is for it
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Vivian Lambert is against it.
"I think it would be too many kids in the class," she said.
Jason Zandri, a Wallingford town councilman, said he’s been hearing a lot from the community and he sees both points of view.
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"A lot more of the concern is being focused on the students, their mental health, the transportation aspect," he said. "We have a projection over the next two years of potential flattening and a slight decline to the population but we’ve seen this in Wallingford before. A long time ago, we closed two of the elementary schools and we had to reopen them, so there's concerns about that, the students in extracurricular programs, afterschool sports teams, all of that, so this is not a single faceted issue," he said.
The discussion is slated to continue at the next town council meeting, which will be on the second Tuesday in March.
