Potential buyers to look at Savio

Word is that representatives from North Cambridge Catholic High School will be looking at the former location of Savio High School in East Boston as a possible future site. NCC, currently located just off Mass. Ave. about a mile northwest of Porter Square, apparently needs to move and has been negotiating with the Archdiocese of Boston for a building that housed another school near Savin Hill in Dorchester. After eight months the two sides still seem far apart with regard to price, so the school's board wants to look elsewhere.

NCC is one of 24 schools that are part of the Cristo Rey Network, which educates urban teens using "a unique program that requires students to work one day a week with a corporate sponsor in order to subsidize their tuition," according to Time magazine, which called the program "an island of success in the Catholic ocean."

Savio shut down in June of 2007 due to financial difficulties. The school, run by the Salesian order of the Catholic Church, opened its doors in 1958 as St. Domenic Savio High School. After several decades of success (I graduated in 1981), the Salesians announced that they needed to close down the school, but the community expressed outrage and a number of accomplished alumni stepped forward and negotiated a deal. The doors opened in the fall of 1993 as Savio Preparatory High School, and though the institution wasn't shut for any school days, a significant number of faculty members and students had moved on. By the mid-2000s the school was in trouble again and nothing would save it.

While the gym building has been utilized as the Salesian Boys & Girls Club, the classroom building -- a brick structure at the corner of Horace and Byron streets (see photo) -- is older and needs quite a bit of work. Plaster is falling inside rooms and offices, tiles are chipped and broken, there's been some water damage and there's a musty smell throughout. It's been said that the building needs "hundreds of thousands of dollars" worth of work. The visit by NCC is only an initial step, and it remains to be seen whether this is simply a tactic by the school to spur on the negotiations with the archdiocese for the Dorchester site.

The irony here is that Savio was one of the places that Cristo Rey initially considered back when the program first came to scout sites in Boston at some point just as the organization was forming about a decade ago. I was on the faculty at the time, and Savio's leadership quickly squashed the idea. Cristo Rey kept looking and discovered that NCC was an ailing Catholic high school willing to embrace the innovative approach.

The missing link

It's disappointing to see the long-proposed link-up of the Blue and Red MBTA lines talked about as something that will never happen, as is the case in today's Globe. I've been hoping to see this project come to fruition for years, and the state is apparently legally bound to push forward with plans for it. The money to actually construct the connection, however, is not there right now and neither is the will.

From what I've read in the past, the Blue Line tunnel already continues from Bowdoin -- the current last stop -- to the Red Line's MGH/Charles, less than a half-mile away, so it is just a matter of laying track and the other infrastructure needed to connect the lines. Still, the estimated cost is $300 million. Hopefully, the state's financial picture will improve enough to get this done.

While I was away...

While I was away -- more on that soon -- I saw these stories in the local news:

***A federal grant will allow researchers to piece together what exactly happened on the Chelsea Creek in May of 1775, when colonists sank and burned the HMS Diana, a British vessel that was appropriating supplies upriver for the Redcoat army. Considered the first naval battle of the American Revolution -- and taking place between the iconic battles at Lexington and Concord and at Bunker Hill, the confrontation is rarely cited as a key part of the nation's history. Researchers may attempt to find what, if anything, is left of the Diana. Our friends at EastBoston.com provide more on the Battle of Chelsea Creek.

***The parent company of East Boston Savings Bank is purchasing the South Boston-based Mt. Washington Savings Bank, which will increase deposits to over $1 billion.

***The specifics may still be a bit murky, but arresting Skip Gates, perhaps the leading African American scholar in the country, while he was in his own home is going to appear to many people as an indication that, despite our half-black president, the US is still a long way from being free of institutional racism. The fact that this happened in Cambridge, arguably the most liberal city in America, makes it all the more disappointing.