The Complexities of The Witt School
- Theresa Cramer
- Oct 13
- 5 min read
The Witt School was on the agenda at the Oct. 8, 2025, Board of Selectmen meeting in Stafford. While the discussion was a basic status update on the process and movement toward hazardous material remediation of the deteriorating building, the public comment session made it clear that many misconceptions – and questions – still abound.
Here are some of the basics you need to know:
Witt School, located at the top of the hill in Hyde Park, was built in 1938, decommissioned by the Board of Education in 2007, and relinquished to Board of Selectmen control.
The school is in disrepair and contains hazardous materials, including asbestos-containing materials (ACMs), lead-based paint (LBP), and PCBs.
In 2019, the Town of Stafford received a $650,000 U.S. EPA Brownfields Cleanup Grant with a cost-share to the Town of $130,000 to remediate the building. In previous articles, we reported that $130,000 can include in-kind contributions — such as the cost of printouts for community meetings, or the time workers from the Department of Public Works might spend helping with the project. In other words, it does not necessarily require an outlay of cash from the town.
No matter the building’s eventual fate – including possible demolition – the hazardous materials need to be remediated before any other work can proceed.
In a routine Brownfields project procedure, the Town of Stafford issued a request for proposals (RFP) for adaptive reuse concepts. Although the prospect of rehabilitating the Witt building has generated some interest, potential developers have no sources of funding at this time.
Haz-mat remediation at the Witt building must proceed due to time limitations on the use of the U.S. EPA grant money.
Much of the controversy, however, centers on whether the Town can sell the former school with any parkland. To quote a report from the Stafford Historical Advisory Commission (SHAC), “SHAC recommends that the Town of Stafford not sell any part of Hyde Park, since doing so would violate the bequest of Isaac Perkins Hyde.”
Extracted from SHAC’s 2018 report to the Board of Selectmen is the following summary of Hyde’s gift to his hometown:
Some continue to claim that there is “no deed” for the building, which is true. What does exist is a deed that conveyed Woodlawn estate to the Town of Stafford, which later established Hyde Park. (The deed is in the Town Land Records, Vol. 46, p. 178.) The deed for Hyde Park documented the transfer of ownership from Eugenia C. Mathews, the eldest daughter of Woodlawn estate owner Julius Converse, who built the mansion atop the hill and owned the estate’s 157 acres before he died in 1892. The 1911 deed from Eugenia to the Town of Stafford does not prohibit the sale of parkland. The bequest from Isaac Perkins Hyde was the reason the Town of Stafford had the money to buy Woodlawn estate in the first place.
According to Amber Wakley-Whaley, director of Grants and Community Development, the deed has been shared with the town attorney, who says the Town could sell the school property. However, Wakley-Whaley has been very clear that the park would not be sold and that any adaptive reuse would require the sledding hill to remain available to locals.
Adding to all of this confusion is how the Witt School ended up in the park in the first place. Here’s what the SHAC report has to say:
“In 1938, the Town’s second high school was built in the midst of Hyde Park, despite the fact that the building committee had first recommended acreage at the fairgrounds — an area actually endorsed by the State Board of Education and spacious enough for future school expansion and athletic fields.
At a town meeting in 1937, three rounds of possibly contentious voting are cited in the meeting minutes: 270 citizens voted in the second round of voting, whereas only 166 voted in the third and final round. Did over a hundred voters leave in a huff or abstain from voting? It is hard to discern from our vantage point in 2018, despite much hunting for context in newspaper archives and meeting minutes. In the end, the high school was built in Hyde Park where the former Converse mansion had stood, and high school classes began to be held there in January 1939.
By 1961, the Town was considering using another site in Hyde Park for the Town’s third high school. At that time, Town counsel Etalo Gnutti was quoted in the Springfield Union newspaper as saying:
‘Apparently there was no challenge or litigation at that time [i.e., in 1937] concerning using the park area for a public school building, but it is my sound opinion that the will of the late Isaac Hyde does not designate that it is broad enough to use the property for such purposes.’
And so the third high school, which opened for classes in 1971, is not in Hyde Park. It was built on the former Laurion property on Orcuttville Road, where the public school and library complex is today.”
So, what does this mean? Many people think that the school should never have been built in Hyde Park in the first place. The Hyde Park Commission (HPC) has recommended demolishing the building. SHAC wrote in its report, “If the Town, aided by this Commission, cannot find a suitably compatible use for the Witt building that benefits the citizens of Stafford and in no measure diminishes Hyde Park, the Commission supports the Hyde Park Commission in its decision to recommend demolishing the Witt building in order to return the land to Hyde Park.”
SHAC and the HPC are citizen groups that view themselves as stewards of, in this case, a Town-owned historic property. Today’s Town officials, however, are trying to solve a hazardous mess atop the hill, and are exploring all the avenues to do so. That could mean bulldozing the building after remediation, and returning the park to its full former glory, or finding a developer with a plan – and the money – to transform the building.
As First Selectman Bill Morrison said multiple times during Wednesday’s discussion, “There’s still a lot of work to be done.” That work includes considering how best to honor the wishes of Stafford native Isaac Perkins Hyde. Without a doubt, the Town of Stafford owns both Hyde Park and the deteriorated Witt building. It is this latter problem that must be solved now, which is why the idea of a 100-year lease to a developer is also being considered. As the SHAC report reports, “According to Mr. Muska, several past actions have the net effect of removing the Witt School property from the restrictions of Isaac P. Hyde’s 1897 will. In Mr. Muska’s opinion, there are no deed restrictions on the use of the Witt School property.”
One thing is sure: we won’t have a final plan for some time to come.
Read the entire SHAC report by downloading:
