The sweeping plan to renovate and expand Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School drew a landslide of support in Tuesday’s historic Islandwide election, with about 85 per cent of voters approving the $333.5 million project.
Soon after the polls closed at 7 p.m., unofficial tallies from the six town clerks showed decisive majorities.
“We won overwhelmingly in six towns. There was no question about it,” all-Island school committee chair Amy Houghton said, as supporters gathered at the Portuguese American Club in Oak Bluffs Tuesday night to celebrate the landmark vote.
A provisional count, certified by school district secretary Rebecca Claussen and business affairs manager Mark Friedman shortly before 10 p.m., was 3,448 votes in favor and 647 against.
“There is a mandate across the Island ... and it showed that people felt like their votes really counted,” Ms. Houghton said.
Work is expected to begin next summer on the two-story classroom wing addition, followed in 2029 by a year’s worth of extensive renovations to the existing school.
Architects working with the 25-member school building committee have completed about 15 per cent of the design so far, said Sam Hart, the high school’s staff coordinator for the building project. Their work has been funded by $2 million that town meeting voters approved in 2022.
Tuesday’s vote frees up the school to proceed with the project.
“The architect will come back [and] the engineers will come back and figure out what the spaces are going to look like, everything down to the furniture, the fixtures, the paint colors, everything,” Mr. Hart said.
“We’ll be shovel-ready in the spring of 2027,” he said.
The Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) has pledged to reimburse at least $77 million of the construction costs, using revenue from the state sales tax, but Islanders first had to vote to borrow the rest.
They turned out in force to do it. Some towns saw hundreds more ballots than in the annual spring town election only a few weeks ago.
“It was very, very busy all day and did not ever stop,” said West Tisbury town clerk Tara Whiting-Wells.
Many voters arrived in family groups. Sarah Hartenstine, who came to the Tisbury polls with her father Russ, voted yes with enthusiasm.
“I went to high school here, and I know how badly we need a new one. I had a ceiling tile fall on me in Spanish class one year,” said Ms. Hartenstine, who graduated in 2023.
Building committee member Tracey Stead voted in Tisbury alongside her sons Griffin, 21 and Elliot, 19, who was taking part in his first election.
All three said they looked forward to a new and improved high school for the youngest Stead brother, now 13 and in sixth grade.
Other parents brought smaller children, occasionally sweetening the deal for those too young to vote.
“Ice cream, ice cream, ice cream,” one little girl chanted with a gap-toothed smile, as she and her dad headed for the family car.
Tuesday’s vote opens a new chapter in the long-running campaign to update and expand the high school, which opened in 1959 as the Vineyard’s first all-Island public school and saw its last capital improvements in the 1990s.
Starting in the 2010s, the high school applied six times to join the MSBA building program, finally winning provisional acceptance in 2022 after Island voters approved a $2 million feasibility study and town leaders agreed on a cost-sharing formula.
The school building committee has spent the past two years developing the project, working with Tappé Architects — the company that designed the Tisbury School renovations — on a design that could meet the school’s many needs without overburdening Island taxpayers.
The 199,000-square-foot design meets current state requirements for classroom size, energy efficiency and other standards that did not exist when the original school was drawn up seven decades ago.
While some Islanders have balked at the project’s high cost, supporters have pointed to the school’s many obsolete systems and its general decay as problems that will grow no cheaper to address as time goes by.
“Spend the money,” said Sam Hall, a West Tisbury resident with two kids currently in the high school. “We will spend it now, or spend more later.”
Every single town voted in favor of the project, and by wide margins. Edgartown voted 733-115; Oak Bluffs voted 787-164; Tisbury voted 762-169; West Tisbury voted 679-108, with two provisional ballots yet to be certified and one blank ballot; Chilmark voted 365-54; and Aquinnah voted 122-37, according to the certified results.
“When I heard the first towns coming in, I literally welled up,” said superintendent of schools Richard Smith. “I’m just ecstatic, and I feel like the Island has come through.”
While the election night vote totals are still subject to change, Mr. Friedman said the outcome is not.
“Two of the clerks have notified us that there are still a handful of provisional ballots out there, [although] these won’t remotely jeopardize the results,” he said.
In Oak Bluffs, a steady stream of voters came in to cast their ballots as the day waned. Select board member Emma Green-Beach was among them, and voted yes.
“I feel confident that the committee did their due diligence in the process thus far,” she said. “I’ve been on a tour of the high school, and getting this MSBA funding is so important.”
School building committee member Sally Rizzo said the turnout and landslide showed voters’ commitment to their community.
“I think people realize how important the high school is to the Island, and they didn’t want to see it deteriorate,” said Ms. Rizzo, who estimated that 30 per cent of the Vineyard’s registered voters cast ballots in the election.
Mr. Hart gave thanks to everyone who turned out.
“Thank you, voters,” he said. “We’re so proud of this community.”
Haley Sandlow, Bill Eville, Emma Kilbride, Charles Leitner and Ethan Genter contributed to this report.
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