HINGHAM — September 14, 2026 — Thirteen rooftop units, five heating and ventilation units and every exhaust fan at Hingham High School are at the end of their life and moving toward complete failure, the district’s facilities director told the School Committee. The chiller is running at about 60 percent and has to be power-cycled constantly. The project that would replace all of it is at least three years away.
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Matthew Meehan, Director of Facilities, separated the two problems: the boilers are heating, and heating is the smaller one.
“If we replace the boilers, great. All we’re doing is replacing the heat that is provided to the ventilation systems,” he said. Several rooftop units failed over the winter and had to be recouped immediately.
The boilers are being dealt with anyway, because the alternative was worse. The district is procuring three or four new boilers at 3 million BTUs each to take a single 10-million-BTU unit offline, with work beginning around mid-December. The new units are roughly the size of a small refrigerator and would be craned in on the Pleasant Street side of the building. Boiler number one brought a service technician back four times last year; it has been stable since the end of February, after pump circulators and three expansion tanks were added.
The district had considered renting a backup boiler instead. That came in at about $120,000 for a single heating season, before piping into the existing building and before engineering. Multiplied across the years the high school project will take, Meehan said, the cost was extraordinary. The new boilers will instead stay in place as full backup to whatever HVAC system the project installs — though the MSBA will not fund them.
Executive Director of Business & Support Services, Aisha Oppong, added that none of this replaces the project now underway — it complements it.
Meehan also reported that every HVAC system, boiler, domestic hot water system and distribution system in the district received preventive maintenance this summer, which was not true a year ago, along with every filter, kitchen overhead and exhaust fan. HVAC runs 40 to 50 percent of the maintenance budget in any given year. The high school consumed most of this year’s maintenance spending, roughly half of it on boilers alone — a figure that excludes the town meeting articles for the life safety system.
The committee adopted the PROTECT Act policy on a single read, waiving its usual second, and Hingham joins neighboring South Shore districts this week to put the state-required policy in place. The state issued the requirement about three days before its own Sept. 1 deadline. The district’s procedure was already written; the policy is the paperwork catching up. It governs what happens if law enforcement officers come to a school and how students and staff are kept safe. Member Kerry Ni flagged that the model policy’s non-discrimination language did not match Hingham’s existing policy AC, and the motion carried with the district’s broader protective-class list substituted in.
