One of 5 responses to city’s call for health-career academy’s new home

The city of Boston is reviewing five proposals — including one from a team that includes the current owner of the largely shuttered Carney Hospital campus in Dorchester— as it considers options for a new home for the Boston Public Schools’ Edward M. Kennedy (EMK) Academy of Health Careers as part of a larger plan to expand the school’s capacity and impact.

The city put out a Request for Proposals (RFP) last December asking for “proposals from qualified owners” willing to lease space to the city for a “long-term home” for the school with a 20-to-25-year agreement and a “fixed-price option to purchase” the property as part of the deal.

The Reporter has learned that one of the five proposals submitted by the Jan. 27 deadline was from an entity called “Silver Carney Dorchester LLC,” which is described as an “affiliate” of Apollo Global Management, Inc., the New York-based company that now owns and manages the 12-acre Carney Hospital property on Dorchester Avenue in Lower Mills. The hospital closed its main facility and emergency department last August as its parent company—Steward Health Care— negotiated a bankruptcy case that impacted seven of its hospitals in Massachusetts.

Under an arrangement facilitated by Gov. Healey and key officials in her cabinet, the Carney and a second hospital in Ayer, Mass., closed last summer while five other Steward-owned facilities transitioned to new operators as Steward’s operations in the Commonwealth collapsed.

A 33-member “working group” appointed by Healey and Mayor Wu has been meeting since November 2024 with a charge to make recommendations to the governor and mayor about what might happen next at the Carney site. A report from the working group is expected early this month.

The Apollo proposal for the EMK Academy relocation is the first concrete presentation for the Carney property’s potential re-use to surface publicly. However, city officials familiar with the BPS search for a new home for the EMK Academy have stressed to The Reporter that the Carney idea is but one of five that have been submitted and will now face careful reviews.

Notably, the Carney proposal is the only one of the five RFP submissions that calls for existing buildings to be demolished and replaced with a custom-built school to house the EMK Academy. A City Hall source said that the Carney site proposal is “by far” the most expensive of the five responses and also expressed doubt that the proposal could meet the preferred timeline for the school's relocation as outlined in the RFP.

One of the other proposals, according to a City Hall source, includes the site of the existing Santander Bank offices at 2 Morrissey Blvd. on Dorchester’s Columbia Point. Another is from BioMed Realty, owners of an office building at 1000 Washington St. in Boston’s Chinatown section. There are also responses in from property owners next to North Station of a building at 226 Causeway St. and another at 420 Rutherford Avenue in Charlestown. All four of these proposals, unlike the Carney site as offered by the Apollo-led group, would renovate existing vacant office spaces.

The Silver Carney Dorchester LLC team led by Apollo includes Stantec, a Boston-based architect and master planning firm; the general contractor Suffolk Construction, based in Roxbury; the developer Beacon Communities; and the law firm Goulston & Storrs.

According to a summary of its proposal for the Carney site shared with The Reporter, the plan would call for the take-down of the buildings on the Carney campus and the construction of a “brand-new building tailor made” to provide “state-of-the-art educational facilities,” including lab space, recreational spaces like a gymnasium, and a rooftop garden. The proposal calls for a 25-year lease agreement with the Apollo-led group being “responsible for all building and site maintenance.”

The Reporter requested, but did not get access to, all of the presentations made to the city, including the full Carney proposition, so the financial terms of any the proposals are not yet known publicly. However, sources familiar with the proposal and its review characterized the Carney proposal as far more expensive than city officials envisioned for the EMK Academy. It would also be the least aligned with the city’s stated goal of opening the school in a new space by Aug. 2026.

One section of the Carney plan that The Reporter has viewed notes what the Apollo group is saying what it will do if it is selected for the school relocation: “We expect to solicit input from the community to incorporate much needed senior, market and workforce housing to address shortages and needs in the community.” The plan also mentions “partnership opportunities” to collaborate “with healthcare institution(s) on the campus [to] support the establishment of healthcare partnerships (be it urgent care, health clinic, rehab centers or senior care) for student internships, training programs, and professional development for students, faculty, and staff.”

The EMK Academy is now located in two older buildings that are in different parts of the city, with a lower campus (grades 9 and 10) located at 10 Fenwood Rd. in the Mission Hill neighborhood. The second building, which houses grades 11 and 12, is located at 384 Warren St. in Roxbury. Its mission is to be a college preparatory and “vocational high school for Boston students exploring careers in health-related professions.”

In January 2024, the school received a $37.8 million pledge from the Bloomberg Philanthropies to “transform the school over the next six years, doubling [its] enrollment and increasing from two to five the available health careers pathway experiences.” According to its most recent annual report for 2024, the school enrolled 395 students in total in the 2022-23 academic year.

In the request for proposals document issued last December, the BPS said its goal is to take the Bloomberg gift—“the largest philanthropic investment in the history of the Boston Public Schools”— and remake EMK “into a national model of career-connected learning by adding new health career pathways in surgery, medical imaging, and biotech/medical lab science to EMK’s existing offerings in nursing and emergency services, and expanding EMK’s capacity to serve 800 students.”

Under that model, BPS intends for students to earn college credits while at the academy and “graduate prepared to pursue higher education or advance straight into a well-paying career, including within the Mass General Brigham system.”

Above: Students at the EMK Academy are shown during a November 2024 event at the school called Vital Signs Day. BPS photo

The new building that the city wants to identify would be “approximately 140,000-200,000 square feet of educational space sufficient to accommodate at least 800 students in grades 9-12, plus staff,” the document says.

In addition to being located within city limits, the site should be accessible to public transportation, “easily accessible to major Boston roadways,” and “should be proximate to other educational and health institutions,” the RFP states.

According to the document, the city expected to select a preferred site after site visits by an “evaluation committee” in February and begin “contract negotiations” in “February/March 2025.” The school district wants a space that is ready to lease by Aug.1, 2026.

In the weeks before Carney Hospital’s abrupt closure— and in its immediate aftermath— Mayor Wu took a forceful public position that the Carney site must only be re-purposed for health care purposes and warned the property owner that she would block any attempt to “capitalize on the closure of Carney Hospital by redeveloping the property.

Above, Mayor Wu spoke during rally in support of Carney Hospital and its staff and patients on July 29, 2024. Mayor's Office photo by Mike Mejia

“I would like to be absolutely clear that my Administration will oppose any effort by ownership to rezone the property for uses other than the provision of health care,” Wu wrote in a letter on Aug. 2, 2024.

Both Wu and her chief public health appointee, Dr. Bisola Ojikutu, who is co-chair of the Carney Working Group, have repeatedly said that re-opening some form of health care delivery operation on the Carney site is a top priority.

Just last week, The Reporter noted that a group of physicians who still provide care to thousands of patients in the Seton Medical building on the Carney campus have been told that they must leave their office spaces by May 22 of this year. No reason was given for the lease terminations, which were delivered to the various doctors via certified mail on Feb. 21 and Feb. 24.