Northampton Street, which sits south of campus, could be the next address of a Northeastern residence hall project. The site being considered currently houses a school that caters to severely disabled students.
While Northeastern officials say the project is still in the planning stages, parents and teachers of students at the William E. Carter School are protesting the project because they feel the relationship with college students would not be symbiotic, said Principal Marianne Kopaczynski. Parents, faculty and students met June 2 to discuss the proposal.
“[The parents] are concerned about a developer (Trinity Financial), who has a financial interest, running away with a project that maybe we don’t know how to control or get our needs met in; we’re not real estate people,” said Kopaczynski, who has been a teacher for 33 years and principal for one year at the Carter School. “My main concern is the identity of the Carter School if we come under the arm of Northeastern. I would like to have a separate building so that we can maintain our identity, and the developer has indicated it’s not possible, but it’s still in the first round [of planning].”
If the project, first conceived in September 2003, moves forward, Northeastern would lease dormitory space from Trinity Financial and the Carter School would be like a condominium in the building, Kopaczynski said. The Carter School project is similar to the Davenport Commons project, said an official from Trinity Financial, Inc.
“We did Davenport Commons. Northeastern provided resources to build the student residences and the condominiums sold with the project,” said Vince Droser, vice president of Trinity Financial, Inc. “With [the Carter School] deal, Northeastern would provide the resources to build a new school at no cost to the city.”
The resources Droser refers to are financial resources, he said.
“Northeastern would also provide 60 units of affordable housing off of the site, and Northeastern would get access to 125 student apartments – similar to the Davenport concept,” he said.
Northeastern needs more student housing, Droser said, and as part of creating that housing Trinity Financial would leverage Northeastern’s financial resources to build a new Carter School.
“The exact structure of the [financial] transaction and the other parties hasn’t been determined yet,” Droser said.
Another area yet to be determined is the future of the garden that parents and staff members have raised $500,000 to build. Kopaczynski said the construction plans for the garden are 95 percent complete and they have been working on that project since 1998.
The concepts from Trinity Financial do not include the full-scale half-million dollar garden project, Kopaczynski said.
“Our healing garden is not being given the space or the attention that we had already developed it to have,” she said. “We’re also concerned about the privacy in the garden, that there aren’t seven floors of students overlooking the garden. That would take away the sense of serenity.”
Kopaczynski said the benefits of the project are all dependent on the developer and “so far the design is not good.”
“We’re hoping to negotiate something that really would give us at least what we have, if not better,” Kopaczynski said. “I think Mayor [Thomas M. Menino] supports that, so it’s probably going to be a matter of dollars and cents.”
Droser said he recognizes there are issues to tackle and said he hopes to find “something that works for everybody.”
“The idea of building the new school for this very fragile student population is a great opportunity we should take advantage of,” Droser said. “The school that Carter operates now is old and tired and not able to provide all the programming for these students.”
The positive parts of the concept, Kopaczynski said, include a therapeutic pool and the long-term benefit of a new building to house the school that has been in the current building since 1976. Currently, the students at the Carter School, aged 16 to 22 years old but cognitively at a 1 to 3-year-old level, use Northeastern’s pool in the Cabot Gym as part of their program.
“Northeastern has been a good neighbor in that we have been allowed to use the swimming pool at no cost to the city for many, many years, and our students have been going over one morning a week to walk the indoor track [in the Marino Center],” Kopaczynski said. “We have a relationship with the sports medicine students; they help one to one in the swimming pool.”
Amanda Lamoureux, a middler civil engineering major, said it could be a good idea if the entrances from the school and the residence hall are separate.
“It’s a two-sided story,” Lamoureux said. She said NU needs to consider things like the noise level of college students and the interaction between Carter School and NU students.
Middler civil engineering major Allison Interrante agreed that she could see both sides — the developer and the Carter School.
“Moving the students [of the Carter School] sounds like a bad idea, but I don’t know much about disabilities,” Interrante said.
The Carter School’s main concern now is the well being of its students.
“[The project] is going to be a set back for our students who don’t learn quickly,” Kopaczynski said. “We will have to translate to a temporary building for two years, then come back to a new one – the long term would be good, but in the short term some of these youngsters who are bearing the brunt of the change won’t benefit.”
