Despite finally looking ready for construction, Lexington High School’s Bloom building project has been pushed back another three years.
Officially, the town cites a “dangerous oversight regarding rooftop structural integrity during harsh winters” as the main reason behind the delay in construction, according to a ParentSquare post on Feb. 30, 2026.
“I have no issue with this,” D. Leigh, a freshman at LHS, said. “Going to an ancient school means we get more days off for stupid reasons like the main building stairs collapsing on themselves.”
However, this story doesn’t quite add up. The Bloom Project’s rooftops are designed in a near-identical fashion to the current high school building. Despite pipes bursting and nearly untraversable conditions in the Quad, no building has yet collapsed under any form of “harsh winter” since the school’s construction in 1953.
Suspecting something deeper at play, The Muskrat’s team has opted to investigate the issue further. By analyzing deposits and withdrawals of the high school treasury, local financial experts found significant discrepancies between publicly reported funds and the actual school assets.
While the majority of the financial flow remained stagnant, a staggering 220 million dollars was suddenly withdrawn from the bank on March 8, 2026. In order to uncover the reason for this sudden liquidation, a group of The Muskrat’s investigative journalists went undercover as school administrators to find the root cause.
Simply lingering in the main office lounge yielded surprisingly illuminating results. Our informants were able to eavesdrop on a conversation regarding the topic at hand, though they were unable to confirm the identities of the speakers. Reportedly, the two speakers were conversing about rising basketball star Cash Ng’s predicted performance during the 2026 March Madness tournament.
According to one of our correspondents, they were overheard saying that “It’s free money to bet on the guy. When we win this back, we’ll just say that we found a way to push the project back to the original timeline. They’ll never suspect a thing.” Our source then reports hearing laughter.
Thus, it is only logical to assume that the 220 million dollars were stolen to bet on Ng’s knockout performance. Unfortunately, on March 22, 2026, tragedy struck. Ng, not paying attention, walked straight into an open manhole on the streets of Boston, suffering a season-ending injury in his left leg. As a result, all of the money was lost.
With a third of the original budget gone, citizens of Lexington should not be surprised to see the school construction project being delayed even further than the three years already announced. The question now is whether or not the administration is willing to repeat such a gamble during next year’s March Madness tournament.
For what it’s worth, the Muskrat team thinks the best strategy would be to go all in. But, of course, that’s just our two cents.
