The MSAD 1 Board of Directors voted Tuesday night to close Zippel Elementary School, beginning the formal process toward shuttering the nearly 70-year-old building at the conclusion of the school year.
The district has also received approval of the closure from the commissioner of the Maine Department of Education, another necessary procedural step, superintendent Ben Greenlaw said during the board meeting.
The move is a part of a larger restructuring by the district to reallocate space for the introduction of all-day kindergarten and special education services for younger students. The burden of providing the latter service recently shifted from the state to individual districts.
It’s also a step forward in the Presque Isle-based district’s larger consolidation efforts, as it pursues capital funding through a Maine Department of Education pilot program to construct a regional high school in central Aroostook County to save money and replace its aging infrastructure.
MSAD 1, along with the Caribou-based RSU 39 and Fort Fairfield’s MSAD 20, are one of eight consortiums of school districts around the state that submitted the first part of the application for the project, MSAD 1 Superintendent Ben Greenlaw said in a February meeting.
The majority of the other applicants have not publicly announced their pursuit of the capital funding. The Bangor Daily News submitted a Freedom of Access Act request with the Department of Education in early March seeking those applications.
To become official, the closure of Zippel Elementary still needs to be approved at a public hearing to be held in Presque Isle in May and in a referendum during the June 9 primary election.
“Closing Zippel allows us to allocate resources that would be going to keeping the building open and operating, and utilize those resources for full-day kindergarten, which directly benefits our students,” Greenlaw said. “I think it’s in the best interest in the district in the long term.”
The school, which opened in 1960, has taught generations of Presque Isle students in grades K through five and later strictly three through five.
It was named after Eva Hoyt Zippel, a teacher who taught in the district for 24 years.
Its closure would shift grades two through five to Presque Isle Middle School and grades seven and eight to Presque Isle High School, while saving approximately $150,000 annually after covering one-time expenses associated with the move, Greenlaw said previously.
Among other construction, the district is proposing transforming most of the Zippel playground, which abuts an entrance to the high school, into a new parent pickup and dropoff area to accommodate the influx of students into the school.
Presque Isle High School, built in 1948, has 10 empty classrooms to accommodate the seventh and eighth grades. The school — and district as a whole — has seen steady enrollment decline over the past few decades. High school enrollment is down 8% since 2012, Greenlaw said.