The city has long needed more physical space for its growing number of public school students. While enrollment across the state fell 6 percent over the past decade, it rose 8 percent in Lynn. But building a new school isn’t easy, or cheap.
The city opted instead to convert a former bank headquarters into space for two schools — a collegiate academy founded in 2022, and a high school success academy — giving them room to grow. That shift also opened up space in the success academy’s former building, allowing the city to open a new STEAM (science, technology, engineering, arts and mathematics) school.
The city further freed up space by converting a vacant building once used as an adult day care (a non-residential center that provides supervised care for adults, often seniors, with disabilities) into space for a special education program serving medically fragile students. Moving the special education program there — and out of a vocational technical school building — allowed that school to expand, too.
All in all, these moves let the school district add over 1,000 secondary school seats without the cost of constructing a new high school.
Lynn Mayor Jared Nicholson discussed the strategy with Governing. The interview has been edited for length and clarity.
What kind of need did Lynn have for more school space?
Over the last 20 years, we experienced a large uptick in enrollment. It got to the point where many of our schools were overcrowded, particularly at the secondary level. We had classes that were 30, even 40 kids and it was not fair to students or to educators.
We tried modular classrooms across the district, where we had classrooms that are trailers. They’re a decent learning environment, but they’re not integrated into the rest of the building in the way that a regular classroom setting is. They’re worth it when we have the space and the funds, but that’s a temporary solution and also wasn’t sufficient.
What makes it difficult to build a new school for students?
It’s such a long and expensive process. And we’re a dense urban community, so there’s not a lot of space that’s open to build new schools.
We are building a new middle school, and that’s a project that has taken almost a decade. It’s an almost $200 million project that has had a lot of complications.
The state will reimburse a portion of the cost [of building a new school], determined by a formula that assesses the community’s ability to pay. Going through the state process is very rigorous — it takes a couple years to even get in the queue. And then it takes time for the city to assemble the financing on its side.
Eastern Bank
We couldn’t wait to be able to afford building a high school. It would have been another $300-$400 million that we just weren’t going to be able to come up with, never mind finding the space. And so, we pushed ourselves to be creative in finding alternative space.
What inspired the city to repurpose a former Eastern Bank headquarters into school space?
We were approached by the bank. They’re one of our largest employers, but they had been operating at 20 percent capacity since the pandemic, because remote work just changed the nature of their day-to-day. It was a building that could fit 500 people, but, on any given day, they only had 100. We were sad to see them go, but we understand their economics.
We worked with them to test the waters on what the open market would want to do with that site, and it wasn’t going to be what we thought would advance our goals for the downtown. It’s an office building, and that sector was really struggling.
We started to put our heads together about whether it was possible to use it for educational purposes. We worked out a really great deal with the bank — we paid what they paid for it in the 1990s and they gave us a charitable donation to help fit out the building.
We took possession of the building in October 2024. In September 2025, the beginning of this school year, we opened what had been offices as a school.
What does it take to convert the office space for school use?
If you’re not designing a building from scratch, you’re not going to have the look and feel of our typical schools. That isn’t necessarily a bad thing. We’re being pushed to rethink the high school model anyway, by the modern economy, by stalling results, by artificial intelligence changing the workforce.
It was a construction process to convert offices into classrooms. It does look like a school when you walk inside — it looks like you’re on a college campus, which is fitting, because there’s now an early college program there where students at the main school partner with the local community college.
The room for physical activities looks different than it does in a traditional high school. It’s not a huge gym, although they are across the street from the community college, which does have a gym. The kids there are remaining with their neighborhood school for the purpose of athletics. So, they’re a student of [the early college collegiate academy] but they play for the Lynn English High School soccer team, for example. It does look different than your typical high school experience, but we’re a big district so we have the capabilities and resources across different schools to deliver on all of our students’ needs.
Also, because this office building is downtown, it invites a civic connection that’s really interesting and engaging for students. They can walk across the street when they take college courses. It’s really situating our students in the broader urban environment, which I think is an attractive opportunity to contextualize their education in their communities.
What are the financial implications?
You could build a high school, and it would cost more than $200 million. We created the same capacity for about $30 million.
There is a trade-off fiscally for taking property off the tax rolls. We’ve been really pushing for industrial growth — that’s going to be one of the first things we think about for a lot of the spaces that have the opportunity to be redeveloped. But part of our value proposition for industrial growth is having this educated workforce, so I could see us speaking about how to colocate either traditional education programs or more workforce development-type programs in ways that are complementary to industrial growth. We could let students learn in that environment and then become employees at these companies that need people in order to grow.
The effect [of bringing schools into the bank building] on the downtown is still taking shape. But if you drove by any day after the pandemic, you would have seen a parking lot outside the office building that was empty. You drive by there now, it’s packed. We know at least some of those folks are patronizing local businesses, and certainly this is bringing activity into the downtown.
Is this model a long-term strategy for Lynn?
Historically, we have been an industrial city. We have not traditionally had a huge office sector — we just don’t have that many large office buildings that are going to have the same negative impacts from the shift to remote work.
And just this year, we experienced a decrease in enrollment, which we believe is due to the change in federal administration and change in immigration policy. We’re a city with a lot of newcomers and a very high percentage of our residents are foreign-born. At the moment, we’re not continuing to pursue adding additional spaces, particularly at the secondary level.
But we still need new spaces for elementary students because we don’t have the features of modern schools in our existing buildings.
What are your elementary school needs? Could this model work there?
Half of our schools are over 100 years old. Our educators work miracles in not ideal environments, but it’s absolutely a problem. It’s wear and tear on very old buildings, but it’s also the fact that they’re not built to modern standards. A lot of our elementary schools don’t have gyms, they don’t have cafeterias, they don’t have library spaces, because that wasn’t the standard when you built a school in 1899. It’s not to say that our students aren’t getting art, but they don’t have the dedicated art spaces that modern facilities do.
Secondary and pre-K are more obvious use cases for former office space. Pre-K because they’re self-contained, since they’re not necessarily connected to a broader school.
With secondary schools, you have this opportunity for innovative programming that’s a good fit for converted space. And at the secondary level, there’s more of a workforce connection. For the [collegiate academy], students are going back and forth from their high school to college campus. Part of the value proposition of this early college experience is that they’re learning what it means to be a college student, how to navigate the very complex higher education process.
I’m sure you could build your classic elementary school into a converted space, but I don’t know if that would make sense.
