BRUNSWICK, Maine — Seven months after the Brunswick Town Council rejected a $12.6 million plan to renovate and expand Coffin Elementary School and repair the junior high school, school board members voted last week to recommend that the town borrow $30.1 million to repair the junior high and build — with no state funding — a new elementary school to replace Coffin.
Board members voted 7-1, with Chairman William Thompson opposed, to recommend construction of an 86,500-square-foot elementary school on the site of the Jordan Acres Elementary School, which was closed suddenly in 2011 after a ceiling beam cracked and engineers deemed the building unsafe.
Along with repairs to Brunswick Junior High School to bring it up to fire and Americans with Disabilities Act standards, the latest plan includes building a new school to replace 61-year-old Coffin, which holds the town’s kindergarten and first-grade classrooms, as well as half of its second-grade classrooms.
More Brunswick second-graders attend the now-overcrowded Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School, along with third- through fifth-graders.
Although the town could borrow about $1.5 million of the cost of repairs through the Maine Department of Education’s revolving renovation fund, the entire cost of a new school would be borne by Brunswick taxpayers because Brunswick is not on the state’s school construction funding priority list.
“We considered building a new school previously, and in the end, it wasn’t something we could coalesce around,” Thompson said Friday. “We knew something needed to be done at the school and that perhaps the best path forward would be to do some major repairs and sort of limp along until we got another 10 years,” with the intent of applying for state aid then.
But the council rejected the $12.6 million repair plan, concerned that it would still leave the town with “tired, worn-out schools” that need to be replaced in 10 years, Town Council Chairwoman Sarah Brayman said.
“We felt the numbers really did favor building a bigger school,” she said. “There would be more for the community to buy into, we would get more programmatically, and in the long run, we would spend a lot less money.”
“That sort of left us a little stunned,” Thompson said. “Generally, the feeling of the board was that the property taxpayers might not go for something like that, but the council didn’t think that was the case. They felt the people in Brunswick would support [a larger] bond.”
After public meetings held by the school board during the past four months to gauge the sentiment of residents, the board’s consensus seemed to be that “perhaps we ought to bite the bullet now and put forward a new school construction without state funding,” Thompson said.
Not on the list
The most recent priority list for state school funding, released in 2011, ranked 71 school districts based on their relative needs for school facilities. The top 12 were designated to receive funding, according to Scott Brown, director of Facilities, Safety and Transportation for the Maine Department of Education.
As the state’s debt ceiling allowed, an additional six projects were added in 2013 and another six in 2014 — among them, new schools to replace Morse High School in Bath and Mt. Ararat High School in Topsham, both communities that abut Brunswick. The Department of Education is “working diligently” with Regional School Unit 1 officials to choose a site for the new Morse High School, Brown said Monday, while School Administrative District 75 officials are “moving along well” toward site approval for that high school.
The Department of Education would provide subsidies for each project once the districts vote in referendums to bond them, which Brown said the Department of Education expects to happen in 2018.
The education department has not yet set a timetable for the next round of funding applications, Brown said, but he estimated that depending on variables including a “very competitive, needs-based” application process and how much funding the Legislature makes available to help build schools, “it’s really difficult to say whether it would be three years or five years, pending their placement on the list. There’s just not an easy answer.”
After discovering serious structural hazards, Brunswick officials closed Jordan Acres, but that did not happen until after the 2010 deadline to apply for state aid to build a new school. Brunswick wasn’t on the list of 71 schools, Brown said Friday. And short of a fire or similar emergency, no additional funding is available.
“Many schools statewide have serious facility issues,” Brown said.
Some, such as Scarborough, South Portland, Wells and Biddeford, have already opted to build schools without state funding.
School board member Rich Ellis said Friday that he was swayed to approve the plan to build the new school after learning that over the first 10 years of a 25-year bond, the payments made as a community would be $17.2 million — $3 million more than what the town would pay if it issued a 10-year bond to repair Coffin.
Brunswick’s Deputy Finance Director Branden Perreault said Monday that the new plan, including building a new elementary school, would cost the typical homeowner about $55 more than the plan to repair both schools and add 20 portable classrooms at Coffin.
Repairs to the 57-year-old junior high school will cost about $6.4 million in 2017 dollars — about $86 a year in additional property taxes for a house assessed at $150,000, Perreault said.
Currently, the school department makes annual fixed principal payments of $1.07 million on a $21.4 million bond issued in 2010 to build Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School, with 14 years remaining on the bond. The school department paid the final installment of its only other bond, for previous energy conservation and air quality work in the schools, in November 2015, Perreault said.
Ellis said he remains concerned that when bond payments are due each year, operating expenses in future school budgets will be sacrificed to keep property tax rates down.
“One of the ways they could react is, ‘We’ve got to pay [the bond payment], so we’ll cut teachers to do that,’” he said. “One thing I’m proud we’ve been able to do in Brunswick is retain the right types of classroom ratios and right type of programming. … The fear is that [a new school bond] will put downward pressure on that.”
He warned that such cuts were proposed when Lisbon voted in 2014 to spend $6.2 million to build a new track and gym. Subsequently, Lisbon voters rejected the 2016-17 school budget four times.
Thompson said he hopes the school board will vote on final budget numbers for the project by its next regular meeting in April, before forwarding the plan to the Town Council.
Alternative school
The school board voted unanimously last week to assume operation of The REAL School, an alternative- and special-education program on Mackworth Island in Falmouth.
The school is currently operated by Regional School Unit 14 in Windham and Raymond. Until last year, when she became assistant superintendent in Brunswick, Pender Makin served as director of The REAL School.
Along with dozens of other districts, Brunswick sends five students to The REAL School at a cost of $42,000 per student per year. Had the school closed, Brunswick would have had to develop its own program, particularly since it’s rate of out-of-district placements is greater than it’s been since 2010, according to a school department presentation.
Ellis said the revenue at The REAL School is expected to exceed the total operating cost of $1.6 million by $293,000 and that the school could move to Brunswick within several years.
“From a Brunswick perspective, this really was a very low-risk thing,” Ellis said. “We have a fairly firm understanding of the economics of this school in that the risk of it being a money-loser for the town of Brunswick is very low. Statewide there is a ton of need [for such services] … at the end of the day, if this thing is churning out an incremental $250,000 a year in positive revenue, the risk is low, and [operating it] gives us more control over how we’re handling our kids in this environment.”