Mayor Reardon’s Lack of Whittier Funding Solutions is Just Prolonging the Issue

When The Boston Globe dubbed Mayor Sean Reardon “a regional lightning rod” early this year, it split Newburyport history down to its roots. The designation was owed to Reardon’s winter-long campaign to stop a plan for a costly new Whittier Regional Vocational Technical High School.

To casual readers who didn’t follow the story as it developed from the start, and especially to the many modern-day scrollers who glance at little more than headlines and photos, the impression was one of an energetic mayor with carefully detailed plans for the future.

To those who did follow the story, as well as other issues in Newburyport City Hall that the Globe never mentioned, that impression was only half right:  No one denies Reardon’s energy. But before we get to the idea of “carefully detailed plans,” it is worth looking at those local roots that the Globe headline struck. In them glows the most electrifying of America’s founders.

In 1754, just two years after his famed key-on-kite flight, Benjamin Franklin took a scientific field trip here when “here” was still one big Newbury. That visit would unlock his most useful invention in terms of property, livestock, and lives saved:

The lightning rod.

Two decades before editing and signing The Declaration of Independence, he rode a coach 300 miles from Philadelphia to examine damage to a church on Market Square. What Franklin found confirmed that lightning is, in fact, electricity. In “The Iconic Steeple,” Rev. Rebecca Bryan’s essay posted on the First Religious Society, Unitarian Universalist website, Franklin is quoted as saying, “

“…I saw an Instance of a very great Quantity of Lightning conducted by a Wire no bigger than a common Knitting Needle… at Newbury in New England…”

Franklin reimagined that wire as a lightning rod to stop buildings from being “thrown about the street in fragments.”

Today, 270 years later, Franklin’s “thrown… in fragments” better describes Reardon’s treatment of the Whittier Regional Vocational Technical High School than any line in The Boston Globe.

Once upon an attention span, the adjective “regional” before “vocational school” was understood to allow for uneven numbers of students from various towns, with higher proportions from lower-income places. This means that while Newburyport has historically sent fewer students to Whittier, it’s still expected to make among the largest financial contributions to the school, by virtue of its size. To balance that, the skills and services of graduates, while serving all towns for years to come, supposedly offer far more value to the richer communities expecting more investment and growth. 

By putting all the weight on the first half of the equation, “cost per student,” Reardon painted the proposal as not just an unbalanced equation, but as something akin to grand larceny.

Snuffed by an 87% vote in upscale Newburyport and by landslides over 70% in every town in the lower Merrimack Valley, only blue-collar Haverhill passed it. Meanwhile, on social media, local folk keep posting their love and respect for vocational education.

Be that as it may, while the Globe’s lofty new title fits Reardon’s role in stopping a project, it unwittingly exposes something he’d rather not admit. Lightning rods do not start anything.  No one expects them to. But our metaphorical Mayor Lightning Rod should have had ready an alternative for Whittier’s woes. Instead, we read of a vague promise—or maybe “a concept of a plan”—to “spend his political capital on revising the 1967 regional agreement to operate the school.”

Really? His track record begins with no positive action—but quite the sticky mess—regarding the library volunteer program that he stopped in June 2023. His record continues with his taking full credit for city-wide improvements entirely planned by the city council before he became mayor—such as the Waterfront landscaping and the Phillips Drive neighborhood and drainage project.

As befits a lightning rod, Sean Reardon’s record is far more stop than go.

Jack Garvey
Plum Island resident

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