Architects have started creating detailed designs for a new Watertown Middle School to determine how much a new school would cost, and that information will be used by the City to see whether Watertown’s budget can handle a project expected to cost significantly more than $100 million.
On Feb. 18, the School Building Committee voted to approve the contract to hire a designer to come up with plans on which a detailed budget can be based upon. When the designs are completed and priced out the City will determine if it is feasible for the City to afford the project, Superintendent Dede Galdston told the School Committee on March 2.
Building a new school is the current plan, Galdston said, instead of building an addition and renovating the current school.
“It’s actually more cost effective to build a new school than it is to renovate an old school,” Galdston said.
In September 2025, the City Council heard a presentation from the project management firm working on the new Watertown High School about the cost of building a new Middle School. The price came in at about $112 million, City Manager George Proakis said at the Watertown Business Coalition’s City Update on March 5.
“We wanted to look at work to do the middle school, but it came in higher than our budget,” Proakis said. “Our latest design (came in) at about $112 million, when our budget originally was about $25 million less than that.”
The latest designs will give a more accurate price tag, Galdston said. The designs will include input from teachers and staff about what should be included in classrooms, including whiteboards, furniture, shades and “what they think is going to be best for the educational program.”
“In order to get new information about the Middle School project, there needs to be more further design done so that there’s a truly accurate description of what the building is going to be like, so that we can go out for an additional set of cost estimates,” Galdston said. “Those should be put out for cost estimating later in the spring, and then once those figures come back, then they will go to the City Council.”
Proakis vowed to build the school without going to taxpayers for a debt exclusion override, and instead would use the City’s operating budget and borrowing. One of the key questions is whether the City has borrowing capacity to handle the Middle School as well as other priorities for the City.
“So we’re trying to figure out how to do this while protecting the options and flexibility that we have in our budget system,” Proakis said. “And that is tricky at this point in time.”
One move the City took to free up some money was purchasing the modular classrooms on Moxley Field that are currently being used as the temporary high school.
“We are in a better place because we bought the modular buildings that are on Moxley Field so that we don’t have to pay a monthly rent on them while we figure out the answer to this problem,” said Proakis, who added that this will delay the return of the playing fields at Moxley.
The project would take a couple years to complete, Galdston said.
“If we were to move forward with the project, then construction could potentially begin in the spring of ’27 and then it would be complete in the fall of ’29, so we’re looking at approximately just over a two year building project,” Galdston said.
Galdston stressed that the Middle School project is not a sure thing, but the new designs will help City officials determine whether it is possible.
“The City Council will consider whether this is debt that they can take on, and if they determine that it is, then we will begin in earnest with the construction documents for the building and go out to bid in order to actually start construction of the Watertown Middle School,” Galdston said. “It’s very theoretical right now, meaning there is no approval that says that we’re going to move forward with the middle school. It just means that we’re moving forward with getting more information about what the final cost would be.”