If they close the Kelly School, I hope the City of Newburyport in its mucho wisdom sells the Kelly School for mucho money. And then I hope the City of Newburyport consults people, like Mark Welch, the President and CEO of the Institution For Savings and Richie Eaton, the President and CEO of The Newburyport Five Cents Savings Bank (you see this is why we need local banks, etc. because they care about stuff like this) and ask them what to do with all that money.

I mean we are talking a super duper historic asset here. Prime real estate in a prime location.

Invest it? Put it towards a capital improvement fund for the schools or blow it in one wad on whatever.

I ask the frogs if Newburyport Public Schools can do this sort of thing (take the money from an asset and invest it wisely). The frogs have no clue. They say they are a political consultant, aspiring political consultants and a frog activist. This is completely out of their area of expertise. (Does this mean I now am going to have to find yet another frog, this one a financial wiz?)

And if the city in its wisdom, actually did sell the Kelly School, I hope they would put deed restrictions on it, inside and out, so some one couldn’t come along and mangle it.

Although mangling historic stuff appears to be our “wow factor” these days.

I would hate to see the Kelly mangled the way so many of our historic assets are mangled.

There has to be something to preserving the literally thousands of stories that are part of that building. The stories, the history, that give it a “patina” if you will.

One would hope that as a former Kelly School parent, one could, one day, enter that beloved building, and go “yes, and this is what I remember.”

One of the interesting things about the historic photographs from the Library of Congress, was that the insides of the houses were often photographed as well as the outsides, because, obviously, the insides were (still are) important too.

Ok, I’m making major jumps here. But if we’re talking about closing the Kelly School, one at least would hope that we would use that asset wisely and not squander it in a bureaucratic blurpy, botch up.

Mary Eaton
Newburyport