In late January, the Abington Board of School Directors voted unanimously to put a $285 million Abington Middle School investment plan on the ballot during the primary election on May 20.

If approved, the referendum would provide funding for the construction of a new middle school. The district would then begin a 12-month design process.

If the referendum is not approved, “the challenges at the Middle School will not go away,” superintendent Dr. Jeffrey Fecher wrote in a statement. “The District would need to use its operating budget to fund repairs and renovations, which would require difficult budget decisions affecting all schools, including cuts to classroom education, staff, programs, student services, athletics and activities.”

Two camps have emerged in recent months: Vote Yes to Invest, chaired by Abington Township Commissioner John Spiegelman, and Common Sense Abington, chaired by Joe Rooney (who also serves as chair of Abington Township Republicans).

Glenside Local spoke with both organizations, as well as Abington School District board president Dr. Melissa Mowry.

Spiegelman began by providing context for the controversial nature of today’s public school capital projects.

“In the past, when a school district needed to undertake a big capital project like building a new school, it could save money and raise tax revenue as necessary. If residents were dissatisfied, they could simply vote the school board out at the next election,” he said. “It was understood that it was about the children of the community. It was seen as an investment—an investment in the kids, of course, but also an investment in the community’s homeowners, because strong schools underpin strong and stable property values.”

Then along came PA Act 1 of 2006, which, Spiegelman explained, inhibited school districts’ ability to save money and mandated that any tax increases beyond a certain index, set annually by state government, be put to a vote in a public referendum in the form of a ballot question. The change “stacked the deck against school districts and put them in a very difficult position,” he said.

Since the implementation of Act 1, only 18 school funding referenda have made their way to ballot questions, and of those, only two have passed.

“Act 1 also precludes a school district from explicitly asking residents ‘Please vote yes’” on a referendum ballot question, Spiegelman continued. “That’s why districts need citizen advocacy committees to support a positive vote, and that’s exactly what we’re doing at Vote Yes to Invest. We’re letting our neighbors know that the current Middle School is decades past its useful life and just can’t meet the educational, safety, security, accessibility, or efficiency requirements of today, even if it were renovated. But a new Middle School building can do all that for our children today, tomorrow, and for generations to come.”

“I’m proud of the work we’ve done. A lot of people are either ungrounded in the process, or they’ve been exposed to misinformation,” Spiegelman said. “We’ve tried put out honest information in a forthright way representing all the reasons, both aspirational and urgent, why we think it’s crucial for our community to invest in this new school.”

The school opened in 1964. At that time, the building was shiny and new, and somewhat typical of institutional designs at the time. According to Spiegelman, several years ago an independent, ASD-commissioned survey found that the Middle School—the district’s oldest asset—has been sucking outsized resources from the General Fund and will continue do so on an increasing basis. As a response, in September 2024, the district released four different plans, each with a different price tag.

In February, Dr. Fecher wrote the following in a memo:

Building a new Middle School also avoids disrupting student education during a multi-year construction process. A renovation project would mean relocating students and teachers to areas of the building not under construction, or using modular classrooms during construction; building a new school allows students to continue learning in the current Middle School until the new one is completed. 

Rooney, a Bishop McDevitt graduate and a father of five, says renovation is the better option.

“In June 2022, the district announced a public meeting to go over a facilities analysis, which included the middle school,” Rooney said. “It was roughly $100 million of work the middle school needed, and they had a ten-year plan for what needed to be done. I thought that was a lot of money, and then the following fall, they hired a company to develop plans to build a new school. There wasn’t one word about that in June 2022.”

According to Rooney, $121 million was spent on the new high school in 2017, which will not be paid off for another 15 years.

“They finished that project, and there wasn’t any discussion regarding the possibility to renovate,” he said. “I’ve been to every meeting about this plan. I’ve walked through the building, on the roof, in the basement, looking at everything I could. The building is solid as a rock. It was built in five sections with various wings. I estimated that the building is worth $50 million. The 30,000 sf science wing is only 27 years old and is in great shape, as is the gym. We have a beautiful administration section and library. If you add those four together, it’s about $20 million to renovate.”

Rooney said he wants to know why the district would raze a $50-100 million dollar building “just to rebuild it.”

“There are environmental and financial arguments in favor of renovation. The district wants to borrow as much money as possible, because that’s power. The referendum doesn’t put limits on the term of the loan, so there’s basically no cost protections for the taxpayers,” he said. “There aren’t any available plans for the new school. We want a better plan. We want to know what we can do for $50 million, for $100 million, for $150 million. We need parameters. I’m asking for those questions to be answered before we give them $285 million.”

According to Rooney, the district has a significant number of kids who are reading below grade level, and a new building will not improve their outcomes.

“Who’s the best reading teacher at Roslyn, at Copper Beech? That should be a number one issue. The fights in the middle and high schools are happening because kids are unprepared to take those classes, so school becomes a waste of time. A building can’t teach anyone how to read,” he said. “You need good books, good curriculum, and good teachers. Without those, the kids aren’t going to be successful. Buildings don’t teach kids.”

Dr. Mowry provided the following statement in response to the claims above:

The scores to which Mr. Rooney refers were presented in the context of mid-year achievement data, which is used primarily to help the District understand where it needs to direct resources. Last year’s achievement data for our grade schools revealed that our students’ reading scores have rebounded to pre-pandemic levels. We have pockets of students for whom reading fluency comes less easily, primarily, though not exclusively, our Title 1 students who come from families who are at or below the poverty line. As a literature professor, a parent, and a community member, this is an urgent matter for me. I want all our students to have strong reading skills so that they have critical access to knowledge and the rich history of human expression. I know the district shares this sense of urgency and takes this reading achievement gap very seriously. Teachers and administrators are constantly exploring different ways to help these students through targeted instruction and other means.

Regarding environmental concerns, Rooney argues that those in favor of a new building should consider the amount of energy expended via a demolition.

“We just banned plastic bags in the township. I estimate that the building weighs about 9,000 tons. They want to tear it down and put it in the trash,” he said. “How much energy is it going to take to build that new building? All the new concrete and new steel is far more destructive than single-use plastic bags. How many trucks is it going to take to haul all of that away?”

Dr. Mowry believes the long-term benefits will outweigh the short-term environmental impacts.

“I am heartened to see Mr. Rooney’s newly-minted commitment to environmental stewardship. But I also think that the cost to tear down and haul away has to be offset by the energy savings and efficiencies that a new building will provide,” she said. “I think that’s significant. It’s important to understand the project in its totality, as opposed to individual parts. I have encouraged the district to think about the energy sources we’re going to put in place. There are a lot of decisions that are going to be made. The less intensive the energy usage is, the better it will be for the environment and the community.”

Rooney argues that the building has been intentionally neglected.

“Three years after that assessment, they haven’t done anything. The badly needed jobs from 2022 haven’t been done. They should have been working on that stuff,” he said. “Our district had $50 million in our special fund. It covers PSERS and capital improvements. Why wasn’t that fund used for these smaller projects? We don’t want to give $285 million if they can’t maintain $100 million building.”

Dr. Mowry pushed back against Rooney’s claim of neglect.

“During the facilities evaluation, we learned that our maintenance teams had done an exceptional job extending the lives of the major systems in that building. The $50 million in the general fund came prior to the state shift in mandate for school district contributions to that fund, which depleted that number quite a bit,” she said, noting that the state dictates that districts can only have eight percent of their total operating budget in that fund. “During the pandemic, when people were losing jobs, the board decided not to raise taxes for two consecutive terms. So we dipped into that general fund.”

She went on to note that the district has an ethical obligation to put the facts before voters, as well as a general obligation to serve the area’s residents, the students, and their families.

“We’ve worked very hard over the three years of his process to be as transparent as possible with voters in Abington and Rockledge. It’s been a multi-phase process, and one of the things that was really important to this board is that we get input from the community before advancing a referendum,” she said. “That’s one of the most important aspects of this from a school board perspective. We’re a community-based organization, and we’re not interested in usurping anyone’s right to vote. We want to make sure that we develop a project that will serve both the needs and the means of the community.”

“The district has been very careful to limit its communications to those facts, which include what kinds of work needs to be done on the current middle school, versus what it would take to build a new school, the benefits and the costs of both projects,” she said. “They’ve also doing some voter communication information, all of which are important for voters so people can let the district know where they stand on the referendum.”

The gut renovation’s estimate was around $200 million, Dr. Mowry noted, adding that the cost difference for a new building was “negligible given that all the operating systems would be designed for the new building, and would likely yield energy savings.”

A new building “will give us more square footage, modern science facilities, and a fully ADA-compliant building, among other things,” she said. The option we put on the referendum question was the one that the majority of the people who participated in the survey preferred. That’s the criteria we were considering. The gutting would be a lot more disruptive to kids’ learning because we’d have to rent temporary classrooms.”

On Tuesday, April 6, Abington School District posted the following:

Did you know? The estimated tax impact for a new Middle School will not happen all at once. If the referendum is approved by voters on May 20, property taxes will gradually increase over the duration of the project as bonds are issued, ultimately reaching the estimated $54 per month on a median homestead in the district by 2029 or 2030.

“Conversation is really the sign of a healthy community. Regardless of the outcome, we’re all going to have go back to being neighbors,” Dr. Mowry said.

For more on Vote Yes to Invest, you can visit their Facebook page. For more on Common Sense Abington, you can visit their Facebook page. For more information about the tax implications of the May 20 referendum, you can visit https://www.oneasdonefuture.org/cost.

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