CARIBOU, Maine — Officials of the local area school district are awaiting the completion of a study from a Portland architectural firm to help determine whether they should renovate the three aging elementary and middle schools in the city or construct a new building to house students from all three facilities.
Once a project is in place, the Eastern Aroostook Regional School Unit 39 can receive state Department of Education funding that local officials were told last year was available to them, Superintendent Susan White said Monday.
“We are still in the very early beginning stages of this,” she noted of the capital improvement project. “It just started when we hired the architects to do the study in the winter, and we have held one community forum, with another to be scheduled.”
According to White, PDT Architects is conducting an engineering and feasibility study focused on Teague Park Elementary, Hilltop Elementary and the Caribou Middle School to help the district determine if it would be safe and more cost efficient to renovate all three or construct a new building. The study should be completed by mid to late June.
Eastern Aroostook RSU 39 serves more than 1,600 students from the communities of Caribou, Limestone and Stockholm. There are six schools in the RSU, with between 700 and 800 students taught in the three aging buildings under study.
White, who replaced retiring Superintendent Frank McElwain in August 2014, said that both she and McElwain attended a July 2014 meeting in Augusta with Scott Brown, director of school facilities services with the Maine Department of Education. That was when the district was told they had been approved for a project, but few other details were released.
“We know we are getting funding, just not how much,” White said. “We will not know until we define our project. And we do not have a project to present to them until we decide either renovation or new construction.”
White said the district has set aside $300,000 in a special capital improvement account for pre-construction costs in the proposed school budget for 2015-16. The costs are eligible for state reimbursement.
Teague Park Elementary was built in the 1950s, Hilltop Elementary in the 1960s and Caribou Middle School in 1926, the superintendent said.
“They all have a lot of wear on them, especially the middle school,” she said. “There have been some cosmetic renovations and walls constructed in the schools, and the [Caribou Middle School] entrance was opened up several years ago as a security feature, so we could see who was coming into the building. But there have been no recent significant upgrades.”
White said Monday that she did not have a breakdown of the individual costs for maintaining the Teague Park, Hilltop and Caribou Middle Schools each year.
White said she is hearing from citizens who are both excited about the prospect of a new school and concerned about the effect on their taxes.