Middle school plans move forward in Dennis-Yarmouth (Mass.) district

A plan to build a $117 million middle school for students in the Dennis-Yarmouth (Mass.) Regional School District is moving forward after being bogged down in litigation for a year.

The Cape Cod Times reports that steadily rising construction costs while two court cases dragged on mean that $5 million must be slashed from the construction budget before final plans can be drawn.

“We’re definitely excited to get going again,” says Joseph Tierney, a Dennis-Yarmouth Regional School Committee member and chairman of the School Building Committee. “Unfortunately it has taken so long, we’ll have to go through the whole project to make cuts.”

The delays also have pushed the opening date for the school from fall 2021 to fall 2022.

Plans call for the school to house students in grades 4 to 7 on a district-owned site in South Yarmouth. The campus will replace the aging Mattacheese Middle School in West Yarmouth and Nathaniel H. Wixon School in South Dennis.

Voters approved the new school in December 2018 election by a margin of 25 votes. About 57% of Yarmouth voters opposed the proposal.

Yarmouth officials filed a lawsuit in February 2019, arguing the school district should not have bypassed town meeting votes in garnering approval for the school. The suit halted work on the project and came close to disqualifying the district from receiving a state reimbursement of $44 million.

A judge dismissed Yarmouth’s lawsuit in June; the town appealed, but dropped the case in August after signing a settlement agreement.

Just as Yarmouth officials were withdrawing their appeal, residents Vida Morris and Thomas Sullivan filed their lawsuit, keeping the school project on hold. In late October, the court dismissed that second suit, determining it had been filed on essentially the same grounds as the unsuccessful suit filed by the town.

The deadline for appealing the dismissal passed in December.