Numerous Heath residents have written regarding their former school. I offer the presumptuous viewpoint of an outsider, from just over the line in Charlemont.
I settled here in 2015, and my social life has revolved around Heath ever since. It is a magical place, with families that go back centuries, sawmills where I buy raw lumber, draft horses and oxen, the best agricultural fair, syrup tappers, cider makers, and wonderful neighbors. After 15 years in Brooklyn I thought I had died and gone to heaven.
But over the last two years I have watched the disintegration of the social fabric. A wiser man would stay above the fray, but I cannot stay silent on an issue that affects dear friends on both sides. Because Heath has lost the plot.
Its greatest asset was the set of bonds that knit its residents together. When someone in Heath is ill, a network kicks in to provide regular meals. When Howard Dickinson — a revered local farmer who lived every day of his 90+ years in Heath — lay dying a couple of years ago, a succession of neighbors sat with him until his last breath.
I have plucked chickens, herded sheep, felled trees, and pressed cider with my Heath neighbors. Most of America isn’t like that.
But Heathans have allowed a former school building to destroy that sense of community. As a board member of a school during COVID-19, I am reminded that buildings never educated anyone. Teachers do that. And by all accounts the teachers at the Heath school were extraordinary. Without the teachers, though, there is no school; just a building.
It is not the patrimony of generations, nor the lynchpin of a neighborhood. There is no town square, nor memorials outside. It is a ‘90s-era brick building in a state of disrepair on secluded farmland, forced upon Heath by a brief demographic surge and lack of receptiveness from neighboring schools.
So what to do with it? As the old farm buildings in our area demonstrate, Hilltowners make these kinds of decisions all the time — “I’d like to keep my old barn, but do I like it for $20,000?” How much am I willing to pay for my emotional attachment?
It requires full, transparent information about the cost to repair and maintain it, or you risk confusing a liability with an asset. Some suggest the school is worth $4 million, the cost to build it, an unhelpful non sequitur. Real estate is only worth what someone will pay for it — and there is no market.
Northfield Mount Hermon practically gave away a campus to get out from under the maintenance cost. Just when COVID-19 is stimulating flight from urban areas that could reverse population declines in the Hilltowns, Heath’s high and rising taxes and deeply divided community mean it may miss out.
I have driven many mornings through Heath Center and felt a twinge of jealousy at the people gathered on the Town Hall porch, having collected their mail or a library book and stopped to visit on the slate steps.
Charlemont has a beautiful Town Hall. No one sits out front. There is no center to speak of, no feeling of social connection.
The proposal to move town services to the isolated former school feels to this envious outsider like a strange suicide pact. A town center is the iconic feature of New England. The buildings are nothing special — Sawyer Hall has modest charm at best.
It’s the history, and the life in and around them that is irreplaceable. If only Howard could speak to that history at Town Meeting. He lived his nine decades a quarter mile away, never drove a car in his life.
The real tragedy, though, is not the impact on taxes, nor the loss of an active town center. It is the ruin of relationships due to horrific management of reuse planning for a disused building.
By clinging to meaningless figures like the $4 million cost to build the school, Heath residents stand to lose incalculably more. Community newsletters circulating scurrilous rumors, name calling and profanity in public meetings, serious conflicts of interest among decision-makers, gerrymandered committees, and a “shoot the messenger” approach to obscuring financial facts that affect taxpaying residents – Heath has been trafficking in shameful stuff, reminiscent of our national politics.
Some may even be upset with me about this column, missing its point entirely. We should fight to build community – not over a community building. Professional mediation would be a good next step.
Sean O’Neill is a resident of Charlemont.