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Photo by Westwood Minute/Darlene Wong Cancell. Community opinion overwhelmingly favors prioritizing school building construction for Westwood Public Schools' Thurston Middle School over Sheehan Elementary School.
12-18-2025 12:40am
Westwood School Committee Votes to Prioritize Thurston Middle School Construction Project
Darlene Cancell
Editor
New construction or renovation of Thurston Middle School (Thurston) is Westwood School Committee’s next school building priority, decided the committee at a meeting held in Westwood High School's Little Theater on December 10th. The committee was unanimous in its decision to submit a Statement of Interest to partner with the Massachusetts Schools Building Administration (MSBA) for funding the Thurston school building project.
The choice before the School Committee had been which of two Westwood Public Schools (WPS) buildings to proceed with improving or replacing, first – Thurston Middle School or Sheehan Elementary School (Sheehan).
At the committee meeting, WPS Superintendent Timothy Piwowar described the results of a WPS survey in December that shows members of the community overwhelmingly agree that construction or renovation at the middle school should be prioritized over the elementary school.
Of 1,550 responding students, parents/caregivers, staff, and town community members, 91% said that the school district should prioritize a school building project for Thurston over Sheehan. The response was overwhelmingly in favor of Thurston, across each category of respondents, and also across each school community. In fact, the vast majority of respondents who identified themselves as being part of the Sheehan community also shared the opinion that new construction at Thurston should be prioritized over Sheehan.
Reasons underlying the survey responses included the following, according to Superintendent Piwowar: (1) Thurston is the Westwood’s only middle school and is intended to serve all students (whereas only a subset of the Westwood community is served by the Sheehan as one of four WPS elementary schools); (2) the condition of the Thurston buildings warrants its prioritization; and (3) building emergencies at Thurston, but not Sheehan, have caused interruptions in students’ school days. Thurston students occasionally have been sent home early and unexpectedly due to building issues such as plumbing, whereas such interruptions in the school day have not occurred at Sheehan.
Following Mr. Piwowar’s presentation of the survey results, Westwood School Committee members unanimously voted to draft an SOI to MSBA for Thurston Middle School at this point in time, rather than the Sheehan School.
In a December 12th message to the WPS community regarding the School Committee’s decision, the superintendent outlined the upcoming process. “The SOI will need to be approved by both the School Committee and the Select [B]oard in March 2026, prior to submission to the MSBA in April 2026. We anticipate learning in December 2026 if our application has been accepted by the MSBA, making us eligible for state funding for future construction,” he wrote.
Being accepted by the MSBA can open the door to funding assistance for the school building project. In the recent past, Westwood entered into a project funding agreement with MSBA for reimbursement of up to $18.2 million in project costs for construction of its newest school, the Pine Hill School, which now sits on the site of the former Hanlon School.
