Tour of High School Reveals Long List of Major Needs

Failing ventilators. Leaking ceilings. Crumbling floor tiles. Unheated classrooms. Persistent mold.

After more than 65 years as the Island’s only comprehensive school for students from all towns, Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School has some very expensive problems that can be solved only with money.

The $333.5 million building project, which will exceed $400 million when adding in debt service, comes before Vineyard voters on June 2. The plan is to demolish the original 1959 building, remodel the 1990s addition and build a new, two-story classroom wing.

The result would increase the size of the school from 165,000 square feet to just under 200,000 square feet, without displacing its more than 700 students to modular classrooms during the 18-month construction period.

From the outside, it can be hard to see why Martha’s Vineyard school and community leaders are seeking such an extensive renovation and addition in the first place. The high school’s standardized-test scores are respectable, its sports teams and performing arts groups draw Islandwide crowds and its senior classes collect a trove of college and training scholarships every year.

Inside the school, it’s clear that the community is strong, with teachers and students exchanging grins and banter in the hallways and cafeteria. Take a closer look, however, and the building itself is riddled with countless marks of age and obsolescence.

As the Gazette toured the school on Monday, a glimpse into its main computer server room — basically a two-story-tall-utility closet — revealed a tangled nest of analog telephone wiring, in stark contrast to the sleek, black server cabinet that runs the school’s digital systems.

To prevent overheating, the school has installed four separate mini-split heat pumps in the crowded space — a necessary redundancy in case one or more of them fails.

“If this room gets too hot in the summer, everything will shut down,” said high school administrator Sam Hart.

Mechanical systems have failed throughout the school. Some classrooms have no working heat, with teachers resorting to plug-in space heaters and even, in the culinary teaching kitchen, open flames from the gas-burning stoves to keep their students warm.

Ventilation is deficient in many places, including the automotive career training center, which also lacks such environmental controls as a runoff tank, an oil-water separator and spill-resistant flooring.

On Monday, rainwater was dripping through the automotive center’s ceiling onto the concrete floor. It’s one of the many leaks that have stained ceiling tiles throughout the school.

In the health assisting classroom — half filled by desks and chairs, with dummy patients in hospital beds taking up the rest of the crowded space — the intake grid of a floor ventilator is thick with fuzzy mold, and the floor tiles appear to be dissolving.

Special education classes are taking place in a former home economics room, complete with a kitchen, and in the former business classroom, which still has a door to the student store.

Neither of these rooms is large enough for the special education students’ needs, Mr. Hart said, so at times the outside corridor is used as well.

The building project would be less costly if Martha’s Vineyard Regional were not a comprehensive high school, with career training, special education and the arts as well as traditional academics. Islanders made the choice in the 1950s to have all of their children, regardless of post-graduate plans and individual learning needs, educated at one high school, Mr. Hart said.

But as the Vineyard’s population has grown and changed, school administrators repeatedly have had to “rob Peter to pay Paul,” Mr. Hart said, swapping classrooms and repurposing other spaces to accommodate the shifting needs of a larger student body.

State education rules are driving much of the high construction costs, Mr. Hart said — and the Massachusetts School Building Authority (MSBA) is unlikely to reimburse schools for building projects that don’t meet the state standards for classroom size, ruling out the possibility of economizing on space.

“We actually argued to the state that we didn’t need to meet the 825-square-foot-per-classroom requirement, that we could go 775, and they said no,” Mr. Hart said.

The MSBA has pledged to reimburse more than $70 million of the renovation and addition, but the remaining total still would make it the most expensive public building in Martha’s Vineyard history.

A simple makeover of the existing school would have cost about $200 million, with construction lasting more than two years and requiring expensive modular classrooms, Mr. Hart said.

Some Island voters and town leaders are gasping at the project cost, which is set to be shared among the six towns in an agreement signed four years ago and would raise property taxes for 30 years beginning in 2028.

If the measure fails at the ballot box, the capital repairs will still be needed — and they’ll only get more expensive, while the state’s $70 million offer will be off the table for good, Mr. Hart said.

“There’ll be big-ticket items before [town meeting] voters for the next five years,” if the project doesn’t pass in June, he said.

Part of the high price tag for the school can be chalked up to the often-cited “Vineyard factor,” which building project managers have said adds about 30 per cent per square foot due to the cost of bringing materials and skilled workers to the Island.

Also, school building costs are soaring throughout the state. A recent Boston Herald report found that average construction costs for schools had increased about 59 per cent over the past five years, compared to a 37 per cent increase for other buildings during the same time period.

The MSBA approved a $659 million high school project in Lexington last year and a new, $447 million Salem High School last month, while a proposed vocational school in Boston is estimated at more than $700 million, according to the Herald report.

The Vineyard is not facing the steep decline in enrollment that other rural Massachusetts school districts have suffered in recent years. While a recent Boston Globe article cited a 30 per cent decline in rural enrollments over the past 25 years, compared to a 7 per cent drop in other Massachusetts districts, Martha’s Vineyard enrollments — measured by the annual Oct. 1 school census — have remained fairly steady.

The number of students in Island public schools has dropped by only 18 between 2007, when there were 2,120, to last fall, when 2,102 were counted.

Enrollment at the high school fell to 704 last fall and looks be similar in 2026-2027, as the town school pipeline currently includes nearly as many eighth-graders (174) as there are high school seniors (178).

Future freshmen who are now in town schools include the high school class of 2033, currently 189 fifth-graders strong.

The new school is designed for a student body of about 800, but teenagers aren’t the only ones who go to Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School.

On nights and weekends, the school hosts classes for adults seeking professional skills and certifications and also offers recreational activities like evening ping-pong.

“It’s like a giant community center — so many people use it, and so many different Island organizations,” said teacher Elsbeth Todd, a member of the building committee.

The new school design, by Tappé Architects, emphasizes the community-center aspect by placing the main entrance in front of the performing arts center, with a glass-enclosed, two-level lobby and doors into the theatre from the first and second floors.

The culinary arts center would be adjacent to the lobby, with a concession window for the new grass playing field just outside.

Game spectators also would have access to indoor bathrooms, Mr. Hart said.

The adjoining two-story classroom wing would be built around a central, private courtyard for student and teacher use.

The high school building committee, a group of about two dozen town, school and community representatives who have been working on the project for the past three years, has posted the design on its website: mvrhsbuildingproject.info.

The committee also is hosting a series of public information sessions where Islanders can ask questions and learn more details about the project.

The next session is scheduled for April 29 at the West Tisbury Library, followed by a session April 30 at the Tisbury Council on Aging and two more at the West Tisbury Library on May 13 and May 28.

This article appears in March 27, 2026.