The first move onto the grounds

The senior center is a good thing and the town needed one. It was built on the school's grounds by a process the school was brought into last, and the agreement the school asked for was never signed.

Andover needed a senior center. It had wanted one since 1969. It appeared in five consecutive plans of development. It was the number one item on the town’s own long-range survey.

That case was made to the Board of Selectmen in March 2021 by a man who had come to walk them through the plans: square footage, design costs, a site survey. He was arguing for the money to draw the thing. And in the middle of making the argument he said something that belongs at the top of this section rather than buried at the bottom of it.

The town’s first attempt, he told the board, had been to use the unutilized fifty percent of the school’s floor space. That was shot down by the Board of Education and the PTA ^[1].

Correction, July 29, 2026: The characterization above — that the town’s request to use the school’s empty space was “shot down by the Board of Education and the PTA” — comes from the consultant’s account to the Board of Selectmen, not from any PTA record. Lori Blake, a PTA member at the time, states that the PTA had no vote in the matter and did not formally refuse it, but that its members spoke out against siting the center in the school over security, usage, and parking concerns, and met with school administrators who shared that view. The PTA’s position was opposition voiced, not a veto exercised. The distinction matters, and the original wording blurred it. ^[2]

So before the town ever built on the school’s grounds, it had asked to use empty rooms inside the school, and the school had said no. The town had been told no once already, and the frustration in the room was real: we keep spinning our wheels, he said. We do what the town tells us to do, and no one lets us do anything ^[1].

That is the honest starting position, and anyone writing about what came next without it is not being straight with you. The town had a grievance. The question this article asks is not whether the town had a grievance. It is whether a grievance is a licence to treat the school as a department.

Here is how the town proceeded.

In December 2022 and January 2023 it surveyed the school parcel, moved a zone change, and filed the referral that lets a municipality site a project on its own land ^[3]. Every one of those steps was a public, noticed, ordinary process, and nothing about them was concealed. But they happened months before the Board of Education was at the table.

By June 2023 the Board of Education had questions, mostly about student safety on a shared campus, and it had asked its attorney to draft a memorandum of understanding: a written agreement setting out who is responsible for what when a town facility sits on school grounds. That is not an exotic request. It is what you do.

The First Selectman came to the board on June 14 and answered the safety questions. On the memorandum, his answer was that it was not necessary ^[4]. He agreed to review it. He said the town would go to planning and zoning on the twentieth and move forward, because it was in the best interest of the town ^[4]. Two days earlier he had told his own board the same thing, in the same words, and the project had gone forward over the school board’s stated concerns ^[5]. And at the same meeting he told the board why a memorandum between the town and the school did not make sense to him: the town owns all the land, the town owns all the buildings, there are no deeded properties to a board of education, and it is all town money ^[4a]^[4b].

The memorandum was never signed. The town simply did not answer it. A month later the board was still waiting ^[6]. Eventually the town administrator said out loud, at a planning and zoning meeting, with the First Selectman present and silent, that the town would not sign it ^[6a]^[6b].

The senior center got built. It is a good building and the town is better for having it, and nothing in this account should be read as an argument against it.

And no land was taken. The town has held title to the entire School Road campus since the 1960s ^[7]. The board of education never owned it. That claim gets made in Andover and it is not true, and this article is not going to make it.

What happened is smaller than a land grab and more revealing. A town wanted to build something on ground a school uses. The school asked for an agreement about how the two would share it. The town’s chief elected official told the school the agreement was not necessary, because it was all his anyway.

The first move onto the grounds

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