With just weeks until the start of a new school year, the Presque Isle-based MSAD 1 is poised to look very different this fall.
Dozens of changes — from new names to substantial construction — will greet students entering the district’s three schools in Presque Isle after a large-scale reorganization effort made necessary by its decision to close an elementary school at the conclusion of the previous school year.
The Bangor Daily News on Friday toured some of the renovations with Superintendent Ben Greenlaw, who said he is confident all of the work will be completed at each building by the time students return.
Below is a breakdown of what is happening in each of the district’s four affected schools.
Presque Isle High School
The bulk of the $1.3 million renovations taking place across MSAD 1 this summer are being done to Presque Isle High School, which will also be home to the district’s seventh and eighth graders starting this school year.
A construction crew is in the final stages of building a new student pickup and dropoff zone on the east side of the building, using part of what was the playground of the now-closed Zippel Elementary School next door.
Through the entrance at that dropoff zone, the district is working to convert about a third of the high school’s health office into space for middle school administrators, positioned to meet students as they enter the building.
The approximately 200,000-square-foot high school had 10 empty classrooms in the previous school year. All will be full with the addition of middle school students this year, and staff have built walls to split some ground floor science labs and other large spaces into additional classrooms, while retaining science lab space on the second floor for high school students.
They have also converted a storage bay in the Presque Isle Tech Center — a regional career and technical education school in the same building — into a middle school tech ed classroom, where students will have early opportunities to explore the tech center’s programs.
Middle school students will occupy primarily the bottom floor of the school’s main wing, with high school students largely attending classes on the second floor. The separation is intentional, Greenlaw said. The two groups will be on different bell schedules and have different routines before the first bell of the day.
“It’ll be an adjustment for everybody,” Greenlaw said. “My biggest goal is for all of our students to feel comfortable here, to feel like it’s their school, whether they’re in seventh grade or 12th grade.”
The district’s natural scheduling builds in a large transition period for the middle and high school students to learn to coexist. The high school begins its school year on Aug. 19, nearly three weeks before the first day of classes for Pre-K to eighth grade students on Sept. 8.
It then recesses for its Harvest Break after Sept. 18, meaning the middle and high school students will spend less than two weeks in the building together through the middle of October.
The district’s board of directors has yet to determine whether the building will retain its name, which there have been discussions of changing, given the influx of non-high school students.
“There’s kind of two ways of thinking about it,” Greenlaw said. “Do we keep it Presque Isle High School, but within Presque Isle High School we have Presque Isle Middle School and Presque Isle Tech Center? Or do we need to consider like a ‘Presque Isle Middle High School,’ a new name?”
Presque Isle Middle School
The most prominent change taking place at the building currently known as Presque Isle Middle School is that it will no longer be a middle school.
With the seventh and eighth grades moved to the high school, the middle school building will absorb grades three through five from the now-shuttered Zippel Elementary, along with the second grade from Pine Street Elementary School.
In order to facilitate the change, staff has converted the school’s large band room into two classrooms, and a smaller fitness center into the new band room. The playground from Zippel Elementary is also in the process of being relocated to an auxiliary soccer field, referred to as the “barn field” behind the school.
The school likely will soon be renamed. A subcommittee of the MSAD 1 Board of Directors recently recommended the name be changed to Skyway Elementary School.
The name is a nod to both the street the school sits on and the former Skyway Middle School, which is what the building was called until the district combined its two middle schools amid an expansion in 2005.
The full board of directors will vote on the name recommendation during an Aug. 19 meeting.
Pine Street Elementary School
In moving the second grade to the middle school building, MSAD 1 freed up space to add all-day kindergarten and expanded special education services at Pine Street Elementary, which now serves students Pre-K through the first grade.
The district is the last in Aroostook County to add all-day kindergarten, which its board of directors previously approved for the 2016-17 school year before the program was cut after two failed budget validation referendums.
The new special education services will be for children aged 3 to 5, an age group previously handled by Child Development Services, a state agency. But state legislation passed in 2024 put the responsibility on school districts to run the services by 2028.
The new programs will be funded by the approximately $158,000 in annual savings the district is expected to realize from closing Zippel Elementary, Greenlaw said.
Zippel Elementary School
District officials are weighing what to do with the nearly 70-year-old former Zippel Elementary, which closed in June at the end of the 2025-26 school year.
Most of the building is empty, as staff have moved classrooms to the middle school, but the Aroostook County District Attorney’s Office in Presque Isle has temporarily rented a portion of the space, Greenlaw said.
Items in the school that the district does not plan to reuse are slated to be sold off in an online auction, the final details of which are still in the works.
The building’s ultimate fate is still in the air.
“We haven’t really dug in and considered some of our other options,” Greenlaw said. “If we can find a solid educational use that will be beneficial to our students and hopefully something that makes sense from a financial standpoint for us to continue to operate the building, then we’ll do that. But I still feel like we should have a better idea by January or February what our plan is.”
The superintendent has previously floated the idea of giving the building to the city of Presque Isle.