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Newtonville residents protest Cabot School parking plans

Cabot Elementary School’s expansion requires more parking than the site can provide, officials say. Ellen Ishkanian for The Boston Globe

NEWTON — Plans to renovate and expand Cabot Elementary School are causing tension in the city’s tightly packed Newtonville neighborhood, as residents call for designers to go back to work and find a way to solve the parking problem without taking any green space from Cabot Park.

While neighbors say the park is a valuable community asset that should be protected, architects tasked with coming up with a design to expand the school on the “small, constrained site” say options are few for the 90 parking spaces officials say will be needed.

“Any space we don’t identify at the site means more cars will be parking out in the neighborhood,” Alex Valcarce, the city’s project manager for the Cabot School work, told about 25 residents at a Park and Recreation Commission meeting Monday night.

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Valcarce said the original plan, which called for a 48-space parking lot to be built on Cabot Park, has been scrapped in favor of two alternatives that would take up significantly less parkland.

The commission must eventually decide whether any of Cabot Park should be used for shared school and recreation parking.

Residents say more study is needed before an inch of parkland is considered, and they question the wisdom of the current plan to build a traffic “turn-around” between the school and the park along Parkview Avenue, a design that they say would only exacerbate traffic in their neighborhood.

A group of about six residents who spoke with the Globe after Monday’s meeting said that challenges such as snowy roads, snow-blocked sidewalks, and trash pickup have not been considered.

“And they keep talking about the park as athletic playing fields, and how they are trying to protect all the fields, but that’s not what Cabot Park is all about,” said Judy Gelfand, a resident of Madison Avenue. “It’s a park.”

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Cabot will be Newton’s third big elementary school construction project in its ongoing campaign. The new Angier School should be ready in January, when the Zervas School is set to be demolished to make way for a new school building. The new schools are needed not only to accommodate a growing student population, but to address facility issues caused by years of neglect, school officials say.

The cost of the Angier and Cabot projects will be partly reimbursed by the state, while the new Zervas School will be funded entirely by the city. Voters approved a property tax increase two years ago to help pay for the projects, which are expected to cost roughly $45 million each.

The Cabot plans include keeping the school’s facade, built in 1929, and building a new, three-story structure for up to 480 students, with a gymnasium, music, art, and media rooms, and a cafeteria with a stage. The new school will be significantly larger than what is now there, increasing from about 27,000 square feet to the 85,000 square feet that officials say are required to accommodate all the programs to be offered.

The larger building leaves little room for on-site parking, according to Valcarce. He offered two alternatives Monday night, including a new concept that takes just a 15-foot strip of land along Parkview Avenue. In this option, instead of a parking lot, the strip would be used for on-street spaces for school and park use.

The other option would reduce the originally proposed parking lot on Cabot Park to 28 spaces.

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In both these scenarios, Valcarce said, room would have to be found along neighborhood streets to come up with the 90 spaces that will be needed. The arrangement would be similar to the parking plan worked out at Newton North High, where street spaces around the building are designated as school parking only while classes are in session.

Neighbors say they may be open to a plan that spreads out cars on nearby streets, but they don’t want anything decided until a traffic study is done to determine whether the current design will work.

“I think you will be horrified by what you will see if a traffic study is done,” said Caitlyn Albano.

“This is not a suburban school where there is a lot of land like in Wayland or Sudbury,” she said. “This is a dense neighborhood; this is much more urban.”


Ellen Ishkanian can be reached at eishkanian@ gmail.com.