Former Johnson School property (Photo by Mary Goetz)
Laura Forker, who has lived in downtown Natick for 31 years, walks the same two-mile route through downtown every day with her rescued Labrador retriever, Debby. And every day, as Forker rounds behind the Johnson School property, she hopes for a quiet, open space where she and Debby can socialize with their neighbors.
“That’s the one thing we don’t have in downtown Natick,” Forker said, pointing to areas of untouched nature.
At a Select Board meeting Feb. 4, Forker showed up to advocate for the town to allow the former Johnson School property to remain a relatively untouched, open space.
“It’s really important to me to have quiet places where you can go, and all you hear is the twittering of birds and the rustling of leaves,” Forker said.
At the meeting, Natick Communications Director and Project Manager Jay Poropatich delivered updates on the Johnson Future Use Project. After the elementary school’s closure in June 2024, the building remained vacant while the town conducted community outreach programs to gather input from residents on what to do with the property.
“There are a lot of open questions, but the bottom line is that we don’t want it mothballed,” Select Board Chair Bruce Evans said. “We want it to be used, but we need to carefully evaluate what it gets used for.”
Poropatich said the team is currently in the data collection phase of the project and ready to begin evaluating the town’s needs.
As the oldest and smallest school in Natick, the costs to make the Johnson building energy efficient and compliant with the Americans with Disabilities Act led the School Committee to shut it down, according to a document Natick Public Schools presented to the School Committee in November 2021.
Jayme Bastiansen, who lives about a mile from the Johnson School, said she and her neighbors were “not happy” with the closure. Bastiansen’s three children graduated from Johnson, with her youngest part of the school’s final fourth-grade class.
In an interview, Poropatich, a Johnson parent himself, said he wants Johnson to be a place for the community.
In May and June 2025, the town conducted two surveys and one on-site meeting to understand what residents want from the property. The survey results showed residents were strongly opposed to selling the land and supported preserving Johnson as a community hub.
Natick’s Net Zero and Open Space Advisory Committees, as well as the Conservation Commission, wrote a request that the property become an open space with expanded tree canopy. They want to reduce pavement, increase tree cover and to keep it as natural as possible so residents can enjoy an open space.
“They can go walk their dogs there,” Matthew Gardner, chair of the Conservation Commission, said in an interview. “They can chuck a frisbee and have some recreational space out there.”
In its list of requests presented to the board, the Committee called downtown Natick an “urban heat zone” — areas, Gardner explained, that tend to get hotter than others due to the amount of pavement and lack of tree cover.
Gardner explained that features like natural vegetation would remedy runoff and flooding, while tree cover would mitigate heat. “We push for using mother nature to do what mother nature is really good at doing,” he said.
In contrast, the School Committee and Recreation & Parks Commission indicated a need for athletic fields.
Bastiansen, who attended the board meeting, said she was concerned about the feasibility of keeping the property available for the public should it become a sports hub.
Natick Director of Community Services Angela Snell presented an overview of a human services study conducted in August 2025 by a UMass Boston research team. The study showed Natick residents said they need more youth and family programming, a flexible space for diverse programming and a community resource center.
Poropatich said residents lost a sense of community when the School Committee decided to close the school.
“Do I feel that it was a right or wrong decision? I don’t know,” Poropatich said.
“Do we have an opportunity to rebuild that community? Yes, absolutely.”
Forker made a similar call to the community, pointing to new housing developments in downtown Natick she has noticed in recent years.
Natick’s population has increased by approximately 300 people since 2020, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.
“There are more and more people but not really a place to gather,” Forker said. “The Johnson School property could be that place to gather and get to know other people from the area.”
Also discussed at the meeting, as requested by the board, was the possibility of combining three town projects into one: The Johnson Future Use project, the “obsolete” Cole Center, and the Fields and Parks Planning project.
While the Johnson Future Use Project is completing its second phase, neither the Cole Center nor the Fields and Parks planning projects have begun, Poropatich noted to the board. Poropatich also mentioned the projects’ “lean team,” calling the feasibility of a merger into question.
Poropatich said he plans to return to a Select Board meeting in February or March to discuss financial assessments, consider an advisory board and to determine how to best decide what to do with the property.
Forker, who also volunteers to monitor trails in Natick and is a member of the town’s Council on Aging, said she wants a place to enjoy nature. She said she is tired of watching the town lose more and more green spaces every year.
“I realize that Natick will never be like it was 30 years ago when we had all these wooded areas,” Forker said. “But now we’ve got a little opportunity to turn one space back to nature.
“Why don’t we do it?”
This story was produced in partnership with the Boston University Department of Journalism.
More: Behind Johnson’s closing process and next steps (July, 2024)
Open space, with trees, a perfect solution for the Johnson School
property.
Been in Natick 60 plus years, Open space is needed at this time.