ICYMI: Governing: “A Massachusetts Town Converted Old Offices Into Schools”
Washington, D.C. – Governing recently published an interview with Lynn, MA mayor Jared Nicholson to highlight the creative steps the city took to expand space for schools without buying more land or letting unused property go to waste.
As Governing wrote, “Lynn, Mass., converted an underutilized downtown office space into room for two schools, avoiding the need to find land or funding for building a new school.”
Read highlights from the Q&A with Mayor Nicholson below:
What makes it difficult to build a new school for students?
It’s such a long and expensive process. And we’re a dense urban community, so there’s not a lot of space that’s open to build new schools.
We are building a new middle school, and that’s a project that has taken almost a decade. It’s an almost $200 million project that has had a lot of complications.
The state will reimburse a portion of the cost [of building a new school], determined by a formula that assesses the community’s ability to pay. Going through the state process is very rigorous — it takes a couple years to even get in the queue. And then it takes time for the city to assemble the financing on its side.
We actually are eligible for 80 percent state reimbursement for building schools, but even that 20 percent can be a stretch. And the effective reimbursement rate ends up being a lot lower, because there are a lot of expenses that are not eligible for reimbursement, like school-based health centers and land acquisition.
We couldn’t wait to be able to afford building a high school. It would have been another $300-$400 million that we just weren’t going to be able to come up with, never mind finding the space. And so, we pushed ourselves to be creative in finding alternative space.
What inspired the city to repurpose a former Eastern Bank headquarters into school space?
We were approached by the bank. They’re one of our largest employers, but they had been operating at 20 percent capacity since the pandemic, because remote work just changed the nature of their day-to-day. It was a building that could fit 500 people, but, on any given day, they only had 100. We were sad to see them go, but we understand their economics.
We worked with them to test the waters on what the open market would want to do with that site, and it wasn’t going to be what we thought would advance our goals for the downtown. It’s an office building, and that sector was really struggling.
We started to put our heads together about whether it was possible to use it for educational purposes. We worked out a really great deal with the bank — we paid what they paid for it in the 1990s and they gave us a charitable donation to help fit out the building.
We took possession of the building in October 2024. In September 2025, the beginning of this school year, we opened what had been offices as a school.
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What are the financial implications?
You could build a high school, and it would cost more than $200 million. We created the same capacity for about $30 million.
There is a trade-off fiscally for taking property off the tax rolls. We’ve been really pushing for industrial growth — that’s going to be one of the first things we think about for a lot of the spaces that have the opportunity to be redeveloped. But part of our value proposition for industrial growth is having this educated workforce, so I could see us speaking about how to colocate either traditional education programs or more workforce development-type programs in ways that are complementary to industrial growth. We could let students learn in that environment and then become employees at these companies that need people in order to grow.
The effect [of bringing schools into the bank building] on the downtown is still taking shape. But if you drove by any day after the pandemic, you would have seen a parking lot outside the office building that was empty. You drive by there now, it’s packed. We know at least some of those folks are patronizing local businesses, and certainly this is bringing activity into the downtown.
