On Tuesday, March 31, 2026, the Lowell City Council authorized the city manager to execute a land disposition agreement that would transfer a large parcel in the Hamilton Canal Innovation District (HCID) to Wexford Development to construct a 75,000 square foot research and development facility that will be used by Draper, one of UMass Lowell’s primary partners in the Lowell Innovation Network Corridor (LINC) project. The parcel being conveyed is Lot 15 on the HCID subdivision plan, but most would recognize it as the former surface parking lot of the National Park Visitor Center. Located between Dutton Street, the Merrimack Canal, and the trolley tracks to the west, and the HCID parking garage to the east, this is the most important undeveloped parcel remaining in the HCID.

The purchase price to be paid by Wexford to the city is $1.5 million with the closing to occur this October. Construction is to begin the following month with the building substantially completed in mid-2028 and the facility fully operational later that year.

Headquartered in Kendall Square in Cambridge – in what has been called the most innovative square mile in the entire United States – Draper was founded in the 1930s by Charles Stark Draper at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) to develop aviation and military navigation and guidance systems for aircraft, submarines, rockets and the Apollo space craft. Now organized as a nonprofit R&D company, Draper remains a leader in the most advanced technologies used by the military and in related fields.

Given their business and the world today, it’s safe to say that Draper is in a growth phase. In fact, the company representative who spoke at the council meeting said demand for Draper products is explosive and the company is desperate to find new employees. One of the primary attractions for Draper, I believe, is the existing educational system here, from pre-K through post graduate degrees, a system that can be a pipeline for the company’s employment needs. This creates a great opportunity for the young people of Lowell to obtain highly valued jobs right here in the city.

The original vision of the Hamilton Canal District that was conceived a quarter century ago emphasized mixed use development. If all development in the district was commercial, the place would be deserted on nights and weekends when the businesses were closed. On the other hand, if it was entirely residential, everyone would leave in the morning to go elsewhere for work and return at night, making the place deserted during the day. By mixing the two uses, the place can always be vibrant and support ancillary amenities like restaurants and retail stores that add to the quality of life of the neighborhood and support small businesses ownership which is foundational to the city’s economy.

Despite the lofty ambitions of planners, except for the Lowell Justice Center and the two parking garages, all projects in the district thus far have been residential, which makes this use even more significant.

However, because so much residential use has been created in this vicinity, councilors questioned the developers about ways this project, which also includes a manufacturing component, might adversely affect the quality of life of residential neighbors. Councilors specifically asked about the number of heavy trucks making deliveries and the volume of noise emitted by the manufacturing process. Neither should be cause for concern, assured Draper representatives. Other than the usual stream of FedEx trucks, the number of tractor trailers arriving at the place will be only a few a month. (After all, they are making tiny computer components, not heavy machinery.) As for noise from the manufacturing process, at a similar facility in Cambridge, when one stands on the sidewalk immediately outside the building, no noise from inside can be heard, and even inside the building, any machine sounds are barely audible.

With their questions answered, councilors voted unanimously for the project to proceed.

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Two motions dealt with the admission process at Greater Lowell Technical High School, something not within the official purview of the council, but something of concern to some constituents. Councilor Sean McDonough requested the city council “send a letter to our state delegation, the state Secretary of Education, the commissioner of the Department of Elementary and Secondary Education (DESE), and the governor, expressing our strong opposition to the mandated change to lottery admissions for our vocational and technical high schools.” The second motion, by Councilor John Descoteaux, requested the city manager “forward a letter to DESE and the governor’s office asking to reconsider the Greater Lowell Technical High School’s new lottery policy.”

After considerable discussion, the combined motions passed by a 9 to 1 vote with Mayor Erik Gitschier abstaining since he is employed at the vocational school. Councilor Belinda Juran was the lone vote in opposition.

Unless you’re the parent of a child who wants to attend a vocational high school, or someone employed at a vocational high school, you probably haven’t followed this issue very closely. To give a sense of how it arose, here is a sample of Boston Globe coverage of the issue:

March 28, 2021 – “Fighting for fairness in vocational tech school admissions” – In this editorial, the paper argued that the state should require a lottery system, citing a just-released study by DESE that identified “opportunity gaps” in the admission process. Specifically, the existing admissions process, although it varied by school district, mostly relied on middle school grades, attendance, disciplinary history, and recommendations. The DESE report found that this system resulted in disproportionately low admission rates for students of color and for economically disadvantaged students.

April 20, 2021 – “Under pressure, state education officials pass preliminary admissions changes for vocational schools” – In the face of complaints (and data) that the current vocational school admission process was “unfair to students of color, low-income students, English learners, and students with disabilities, depriving them of an important career pathway” the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education voted unanimously to change the vocational school admission process to give “disadvantaged students a better chance of attending.”

(In case you think this is a partisan issue, recall that when this all started, Republican Charlie Baker was governor. He was succeeded by Democrat Maura Healey in January 2023.)

February 5, 2024 – “Vocational-technical school admissions should be based on lottery” – This Op-Ed points out that up until 2003, vocational schools used a lottery for admission, but in that year, the MCAS exam became a high school graduation requirement and the state’s vocational schools persuaded the State Board of Elementary and Secondary Education to permit vocational schools to select students using grades, attendance records, discipline records, recommendations and interviews. The writers observe, “This dramatic admissions policy change enabled voc-tech schools to select the highest performing applicants into their schools. Is it any wonder that, by self-selecting their student body, voc-tech schools suddenly became high performing on MCAS tests and other measures?”

May 2, 2025 – “Mass. House moved to block vocational school lottery admissions” – At the urging of vocational school administrators and others wishing to maintain the status quo, a group of state representatives moved (unsuccessfully) to prohibit the Department of Education from making any admission changes before the 2027-28 admission year. Advocates for the current system questioned the accuracy of studies showing admission disparities and contended that the answer is to create more seats in vocational schools. (No one opposes that but it’s not feasible given the cost of doing it.) Proponents of a changed admission system, including Governor Healey, respond that the proposed changes do allow attendance and discipline to be used as weights in an admission lottery while retaining a lottery as the primary means of selection.

May 20, 2025 – “Mass. Education board approves vocational school lottery admissions, temporary graduation requirements” – The new rule prohibited vocational schools from ranking applicants based on “selective criteria like grades, recommendation from guidance counselors, and personal interviews” but does allow schools to use evidence of interest and a lack of severe discipline violations as weights in an admission lottery while also using middle school attendance and “student awareness” (i.e., attending a tour of the vocational school) as a pre-condition for entering the lottery.

According to the Greater Lowell Technical High School website, the admission lottery for the class entering the school this September was held on March 20, 2026. Presumably, people unhappy with the outcome of the lottery complained to city councilors, hence the timing of these two motions.

In voting against the motions, Councilor Juran said that this year, 848 middle school students from Lowell had applied for 428 Lowell-allocated seats, which meant roughly half got in. Councilor Juran continued:

“So no matter what, somebody was going to be disappointed. And if their option is Lowell High School, to me, that’s a great option. And we should not treat it like a second-tier school. Every few days I learn about teachers who are doing amazing work there. We have the teacher of the year in Massachusetts at that school. And it’s the kind of high school I went to, a diverse, large, you know, inner city school. It offers a variety of programs. It’s within walking distance of most of, or many of our students’ homes and it has classes ranging from remedial all the way through AP and early college.”

“I appreciate that no family wants to be disappointed from their first choice, but demand here is higher than supply, so somebody will be disappointed. And the issue here is one of policy: should we as the city council put our thumb on the scale to change the result for a few students to go to this school while others who did get in are not complaining to us?”

“We know the students whose parents have reached out who have said, ‘I wish my student had gotten in’ but the students who now were fortunate enough to get in are not complaining. So I think, sort of saying, that we are trying to change a policy when it’s really the reaction of some families, I think, is something we have to take seriously and I’m not sure this is what we should be doing.”

Ted Leonsis owns the NHL’s Washington Capitals, the NBA’s Washington Wizards, and the WNBA’s Washington Mystics. He made his fortune as a senior executive at America Online (AOL) back in the 1990s. He’s also a graduate of Lowell High School, class of 1973.

In his remarks at his induction ceremony as a Lowell High Distinguished Alumni in 2005, Leonsis recalled that he was not a great student. In fact, when he told his guidance counselor he wanted to go to college, the counselor disabused him of that aspiration, saying he should consider a job at a grocery store instead.

However, in the summers during high school, Leonsis earned money by mowing neighborhood lawns. One of his customers was also one of his high school teachers, a teacher who apparently recognized the young man’s potential because this teacher guided Leonsis through admission to Georgetown University in Washington, D.C. Leonsis thrived there and, as they say, the rest is history.

No one in Ted Leonsis’ family or in the official school hierarchy was advocating for him. Instead, he won the lottery in the form of a perceptive teacher who helped.

There are many ways to learn. Some students who don’t do well in middle school would perhaps thrive in a more hands-on, vocational education setting as is offered by Greater Lowell Tech. But if admission to that school is governed by their grades, attendance and behavior in middle school, they would never get in and that opportunity would be foreclosed. This new lottery system injects randomness into the equation and consequently makes it more equitable.

That’s the “glass is half full” take on this issue. In contrast, a “glass is half empty” view would say that public schools are supposed to take everyone, not just those who have good grades, good attendance and good behavior. Certainly, those who run the Vocational School would like it that way and, if it were a private school, that would be their prerogative. But they are a public school which means they have a responsibility to educate all. Every student with poor attendance or poor discipline that was excluded from the Vocational School under the prior admission policy ended up at Lowell High School. Students with those types of issues demand a disproportionate share of a school’s resources, so when Lowell High takes in more than its share of challenging students – which it must since it is a public school – it dilutes the resources available for most other students in the school, and everyone at LHS pays a price for another public school’s exclusionary admittance practices.

But that’s all theory. The vote Tuesday night was about politics. A Venn Diagram of this issue would find the circle of people upset with vocational school admissions completely within the slightly larger circle of people who vote in city elections, hence the lopsided outcome of the vote.

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My newsletter of two weeks ago featured an essay about Lowell in World War II. At the end of it, I mentioned that I am now researching the 440 names of servicemembers from Lowell who died during World War II, a project I hope to complete by this Memorial Day.

One thing about this research that has struck me is the staggering number who were killed as infantrymen in the push across Europe from D-Day in June 1944 to the surrender of Germany in May 1945.

Last week, I reviewed a book that covers this period. Tubby: Raymond O. Barton and the US Army, 1889-1963 is a biography of the general who commanded the 4th Infantry Division through most of that stretch of combat. With at least six of the Lowell’s war dead having been members of that division, the book provided valuable context in understanding their experiences. If you’re interested in the history of World War II, please check out my review.

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In this week’s Seen & Heard column, I wrote about the obituary of Shigeaki Mori, a Hiroshima survivor who helped highlight the story of Lowell’s Normand Brissette, a POW who was killed by the atomic bomb; I reviewed the movie A Complete Unknown, which is a Bob Dylan biopic; and I reviewed two books, Book and Dagger which explains how professors and archivists helped create a functioning intelligence agency for the US during WWII, and A Short Stay in Hell, a thought provoking fantasy novella about the hereafter.

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Save the Date: This spring’s walking tours of historic Lowell Cemetery will be held on Saturday, May 2, and Sunday, May 3, both at 10 am, both beginning at the Knapp Avenue entrance next to Shedd Park. The same tour will be conducted on both days. Just show up and enjoy.