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Boston Globe, April 7, 2000, Page B1 (Metro Section)

FIELD OF HONOR

Prep school divided over plans to expand

By Brian MacQuarrie, Globe Staff, 4/7/2000

CONCORD - The proposal seems simple enough: Build a 100-foot bridge over swampy wetlands and carve two playing fields out of hill-studded woods that once were rocky sheep pasture.

But that plan by the Middlesex School has created a caldron of conflicting emotions being stirred by strong-minded players on both sides of the issue.

On one side: environmentalists, students, and Concord residents who argue that the Estabrook Woods are a sacrosanct domain second only to Walden Pond in local ecological importance.

On the other: Middlesex School trustees and powerful alumni who say the institution must expand to remain competitive and that public pressure must not interfere with needed construction on private property.

Ten years of debate, negotiation thrusts and counter-thrusts, and a pending legal fight are interwoven through a tangled process that Middlesex School business manager James Saltonstall says eroded several years ago into ''a nasty, confrontational situation.''

To preempt development, 10 Concord residents have challenged the plan before the state Department of Environmental Protection, where an administrative law judge will rule whether construction can begin.

At stake is the future of part of the largest, contiguous, undeveloped woodland within 30 miles of Boston, a wild area whose two adjoining parcels had been managed separately, but with similar vision, by Middlesex School and Harvard University since the mid-1960s.

But now, where one group in the ongoing dispute sees a chance to make a critical environmental statement, the other sees a phalanx of well-meaning but impractical opponents who literally cannot see the forest for the trees.

''Sometimes you have to cut up the baby, and there are hard decisions that have to be made,'' says Richard M. Burnes Jr., a high-powered venture capitalist, former Middlesex School president, and tenacious point man in the expansion drive.

''Middlesex School is not in the land preservation business,'' Burnes adds. ''Middlesex School is in the business of educating kids.''

Since its founding on the outskirts of Concord in 1901, bucolically beautiful Middlesex School has been a forge for leadership. Former Massachusetts governor William F. Weld is an alumnus, as is US Energy Secretary Bill Richardson and Anthony Lake, former national security adviser to President Clinton.

The school's standing is so rarefied that its aura is part- inspiration for the mythical ''St. Grottlesex'' league - a term that links upper-echelon prep schools such as St. Paul's, St. Mark's, Groton, and Middlesex.

Excellence is a given, but the very mission of Middlesex School culls differing visions from the quarreling factions. Burnes, who founded Charles River Ventures, says expansion into Estabrook Woods is vital if Middlesex is to compete for students sought by other private schools.

But many pupils, including student president Molly Tsongas, see the school's portion of 1,300 acres of woodland as an aesthetically indispensable part of the Middlesex experience, and one that separates the school from its competitors.

''We have this resource, and we're going to protect it,'' says Tsongas, a senior and daughter of late US Senator Paul Tsongas.

Tsongas and most of the school's 318 students, if a student-run survey is an accurate indication, share the preservation view. To their thinking, once the school builds a bridge into Estabrook Woods, more intrusive expansion into an 85-acre tract owned by Middlesex will become a given.

Now, the school wants to build two playing fields on the far side of a 32-foot-wide steel bridge. Four tennis courts also would be included in the plan, displaced from the nearby campus by two new dormitories.

Indeed, the trustees have made significant concessions over the last decade following long howls of protest from Concord residents. Plans to build faculty housing in the Estabrook Woods have been scrapped for now, as has a massive proposal that would have replicated the existing campus in woods once trod by Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson.

The school has placed permanent conservation restrictions on some Estabrook parcels, mostly wetlands, and barred development on a chunk of better land for 20 years.

But Burnes and Saltonstall are making no sweeping promises about the future. And the needs of the school - 50, and even 100 years down the road, they say - could compel more construction.

Overarching the technical minutiae being raised by the legal challenge is a more ethereal concern about what these woods have meant to Concord, what they will mean in the future, and whether Middlesex School is reneging on a decades-old consensus to preserve the woods forever.

''There just aren't very many places around the Boston area where people can walk for an hour and a half and not retrace their steps,'' says Lucy Tittmann, a Concord resident and former member of the school's Board of Trustees who opposes the plan. ''These woods have a magic to them.''

That sense of rare value was shared by Lawrence ''Monk'' Terry, a former Middlesex headmaster who encouraged conservation-minded residents in the mid-1960s to transfer 700 acres of the woods to Harvard University, which has used the land as a field station for its Museum of Comparative Zoology.

The former museum director, world-renowned biologist Ernst Mayr, recalls that Terry and Middlesex School intended to preserve its section of the Estabrook Woods as an unspoiled companion to Harvard's parcel.

Back then, Middlesex School put nothing in writing regarding its intentions toward the woods. But Mayr - now 95 years old - says that development was not considered an option.

''It never occurred to Monk Terry that the Middlesex School would not hang on to this piece of woodland,'' Mayr says. ''It was just a silent understanding that they were very much interested in the preservation of the whole Estabrook Woods, including their own piece.''

Terry's son, also named Lawrence, concurs. ''My gut feeling is that he would have tried to find solutions other than pushing into the woods,'' says Terry, who was admissions director in the early 1970s.

Burnes, the former trustees president, is having none of the talk of implicit long-ago deals. ''I am the closest thing there is to a link to the board that was in existence ... at that time,'' Burnes says. ''There was no agreement.''

Burnes also rejects an assertion by someone close to the dispute that most trustees oppose the plan. ''That is absolutely not true. The board has been unanimous on this,'' Burnes says.

In any event, according to Burnes and Saltonstall, Middlesex is entitled to use its land in the best interests of the school.

''If we don't get access to that land now, we may never get access,'' Saltonstall says.

But if the DEP rules against Middlesex, the outcome would suit opponents just fine. Stephen F. Ells, a Lincoln resident and former high-ranking official of the Environmental Protection Agency, sees the fight as important and multilayered.

''It's one of Thoreau's wild countries, and it still exists wild,'' Ells says.

And that appeals to students like Tsongas. Because she grew up in Lowell, Tsongas says, the Estabrook Woods allowed her ''to learn about the woods for the first time.''

''And now,'' Tsongas says, ''I don't want it to be out of my life forever.''

This story ran on page B1 (Metro Section) of the Boston Globe on 4/7/2000. © Copyright 2000 Globe Newspaper Company.

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