Although the city scrapped a plan Wednesday to move the John D. O’Bryant School of Mathematics and Science to the shuttered West Roxbury High School complex, it’s proceeding with a proposal to add a new commuter rail station near the site of the withdrawn plan, Mayor Michelle Wu said in a meeting with the Globe editorial board last week.
Unveiled with much fanfare last year, the O’Bryant proposal turned into a bit of a political headache for Wu, after staff and parents objected to relocating from the high school’s current, centrally located location in Roxbury to an isolated spot on the outskirts of the city.
Building a train station nearby was supposed to help address those concerns. The MBTA’s Needham Line passes a few hundred feet from the site but does not stop there. The closest station is more than a half-mile away, but it’s not a practical way to reach the school site, since pedestrians would have to cross the four-lane VFW Parkway.
Ultimately, the promise of a new station didn’t sway critics who wanted to keep the O’Bryant in Roxbury. But Wu said the city would move forward with the idea anyway, with an eye on reopening a high school there eventually.
“In the months since we floated the idea we did come to agreement with the MBTA,” she said. “We can build a commuter rail site right on that site. And we will look to continue doing so because that site should still be reactivated for an educational use.”
”Once the commuter rail stop is there, the transportation issue challenges will change significantly,” she said.
The idea of putting a transit stop there is not new. According to the Globe’s archives, a group of environmentalists proposed one in 1970 and the Globe editorialized about a commuter rail station there in 1995.
Apart from making the school site more practical for future use, a station there would also make Millennium Park more accessible. And who knows? Maybe someday the area on the opposite side of the train tracks — now occupied by a self-storage business and a Home Depot — could be a neighborhood. It would be conveniently located next to a train station — and, maybe, a school.
This is an excerpt from Are we there yet?, a Globe Opinion newsletter about the future of transportation in the region. Sign up to get it in your inbox a day early.
Alan Wirzbicki is Globe deputy editor for editorials. He can be reached at alan.wirzbicki@globe.com.
