John Foley, of Holyoke, plans to create Commonwealth Academy, a boarding school for inner-city students.
12.09.2010 | SPRINGFIELD - The entrance to the MacDuffie School on Maple Street in Springfield. The school was sold Thursday and will be moving to Granby.SPRINGFIELD – The owner of several private alternative schools has purchased the 15-acre former home of the MacDuffie School in Springfield with plans to create a boarding school for inner-city students.
John A. Foley, of Holyoke, is also the founder of Project-13, a program in Holyoke that encourages middle school students who are at risk of dropping out to instead stay in school.
Foley said the closing on the property was Friday. He declined to give the purchase price, which will become public once the deed is filed with the Hampden County Register of Deeds. The MacDuffie Campus has been appraised at $2.4 million to $2.8 million.
Foley said that the property will go on the tax rolls at the request of Springfield Mayor Domenic J. Sarno.
The property includes several of the oldest homes in Springfield – buildings Foley promises to keep using as student residences – that were badly damaged by the tornado that ripped through Springfield on June 1.
Friday, Foley said he’d signed the purchase-and-sale agreement before the tornado hit.
“I understand that the property was very well insured. That claim will be assigned to me and the buildings will be restored to what they were before the storm,” he said.
Foley’s school, which he plans to call Commonwealth Academy, will be a nonprofit with funding from private donors and government, he said. The money for the original purchase came from private philanthropy, he said.
The campus of the MacDuffie School on Ames Hill in Springfield was among the areas hit when a tornado hit the city on June 1.Foley said he’d like to set it up as a statewide “innovation school,” a sort of charter school allowed under state law since 2010. Innovation schools operate within school districts, according to the state’s website, but get the leeway to try innovative teaching methods as charter schools do.
“What we want to do is provide an opportunity for low-income kids to have access to a high-quality New England prep school environment, to board on campus and be prepared for success at a four-year college or university.”
There will be some Project-13 programs on the old MacDuffie site. The first group of 100 or so students in the sixth and ninth grades won’t start studying at Commonwealth Academy until fall 2012. Foley said later he hopes to have as many as 300 students in grades 6 through 12 on campus by 2015.
Michael A. Serafino, chairman of the board of trustees at MacDuffie, now known as One Ames Hill Corp., said the board was at first very skeptical about Foley’s plan. But it was won over and decided to sell.
In January, Serafino’s group sold the school’s name and intellectual property to the for-profit International EC, LLC, based in Babylon, N.Y. International EC plans to open its own MacDuffie School at the former St. Hyacinth seminary campus in Granby beginning in September 2011.