Though the Board of Selectmen (BOS) had recently hoped to put the potential lease agreement with Our Lady of Mercy Preparatory Academy (OLMPA) for Island Avenue School forward to a Town Meeting in early October, on Sept. 24 the board voted to delay the town meeting by a couple of weeks. The week of Oct. 22 is now being considered.

First Selectman Tom Banisch said this is just a postponement, not a cancellation of the meeting, so that residents can have more time to review the lease.

“The point of this is that we feel that we need to have some public information sessions so people understand what they are voting on when they go to town meeting,” he said.

The board then set a couple of public hearing or public information meetings, one the week of Oct. 8 and one the week of Oct. 15. Final dates and times of those meetings will be set once the town can book the auditorium at Polson Middle School.

“We are going to schedule two,” said Banisch. “We can always abandon the second one if we don’t need it, but if we needed the second one, scheduling that is just going to add time…Public response would determine need for second.”

Getting to this Point

Parents and families from OLMPA first came before the BOS on April 9 to discuss the potential of leasing Island Avenue School. Closing Island is part of the Board of Education (BOE) response to declining enrollment; as of now the plan is to close the school in June 2019.

Our Lady of Mercy School (OLM), located at 149 Neck Road in town, is the main Catholic K to 8 school serving Madison and Guilford since 1954. Early this year the school announced that the school building would close at the end of this academic year and the school would be combined with St. Mary’s School in Branford.

Following the news of the imminent closure, some OLM families banded together to begin looking for ways to separate the school from the local parishes to form an independent school grounded in the Catholic faith, and find a permanent home, ideally still in Madison.

OLMPA has been looking at Island Avenue School as a potential temporary home for the school since news broke that the home of the current OLM (which is run by the Archdiocese of Hartford) on Neck Road would be closed at the end of this academic year.

As part of its schools consolidation plan, Madison had earlier announced it would close the Island Avenue School after the 2018-’19 school year. Selectmen and members of OLMPA had been reviewing financial statements and issues like liability to see if leasing Island was a viable option after the Madison Public School District formally turns the building over to the town in 2019.

In July, the BOS expressed concern over some of OLMPA’s finances and was reluctant to move forward to the public with a potential three-year lease agreement. Instead, the BOS opted to continue discussions with a one-year lease option on the table. Selectmen pulled together a rough list of terms and conditions it would want to see in a lease agreement, which then led to Aug. 2 meeting at which the Board of Finance (BOF) was included in the discussion to offer input.

Lease Details

The terms stipulate that the lease will be for one year beginning in August 2019 with no option for a renewal period or extension. The total rent payment is $535,000, payable five days before the building is delivered to OLMPA. OLMPA would be responsible for all maintenance and associated costs. The lease document also goes to specific details of the building as well as insurance coverage and indemnification.

The conversation with OLMPA has gone through numerous iterations over the last few months, with the town moving down to a one-year lease versus a three-year lease due to concerns about the financial viability of the school over the longer term. At over a series of special BOS meetings throughout August, town officials dug through numerous lease concerns surrounding liability, capital costs, insurance, and timing.

With the lease now ready for public consumption, the town has also been working through other mechanical steps such as putting the possible change in tenant of Island Avenue before the Planning & Zoning Commission (PZC). The disposition or lease of town-owned property technically falls under state statue and requires PZC approval. As the use of the building would not be changing and would still remain a school, PZC voted on Sept. 7 that a special exception application will not be required from OLMPA and the commission made a positive referral.

With the public hearings in place, the town is now looking to the week of Oct. 22 to hold the town meeting. At a town meeting, the item is placed up for a vote and if there is not a quorum of 75 residents eligible to vote in attendance, the motion automatically passes.

OLMPA’s John Picard said the delay doesn’t cause any logistical problems for the school, but he would like to see things keep moving forward.

“We have been talking about this for several months in the open and I know they started more closed meetings, but all I want to see is this get to the voters, get to the town meeting and let them vote,” he said. “Hopefully this won’t be a lengthy process. I would say a vast majority of Madison people would definitely support this endeavor—one, because it helps the town, and two, because it does help us also.”