On days with heavy rain, teachers at the 49-year-old Boothbay Region Elementary School must shield their classrooms from the leaks in the roof.
Water comes in from the concrete parapets, drenching any textbooks, posters and schoolwork that are in its path, according to Principal Shawna Kurr.
The leaks are not the only repairs the school needs.
Some bathroom stalls are not ADA compliant, so a curtain is used instead of a door. Special education teachers work out of closets in the basement that smell of mildew and mold. And due to a shortage of classroom space, some programs are conducted in hallways.
“Things that are just like, oh, that door doesn’t open, or this never has worked. Like this sink always clogs, or my room always leaks, you just get used to it. And it’s unacceptable that we just get used to those things,” Kurr said.
Voters in the Boothbay region approved a $30 million bond in April that would address these repairs. But a group of Boothbay residents has since intervened and put those repairs in jeopardy.
The group put forward a petition in May consisting of two articles, according to court documents. The first asked if those signing the petition approved reconsidering and repealing the bond. The second asked if the bond should be repealed and rewritten to not exceed $10,250,300.
The petition received enough signatures — at least 10 percent of the number of registered voters in the district who voted for a candidate in the last gubernatorial election — but the school district’s Board of Trustees denied the petition, claiming that it did not comply with state law and that it included two articles.
In response, eight petitioners filed a lawsuit against the school district. The lawsuit alleges that the district denied the petition without basis, because there are no laws or guidelines requiring a petition to only be one article, according to Kristin Collins, the lawyer representing the petitioners.
“The petitioners wanted to make it clear that they weren’t intending to kill any school construction project, but to suggest an alternative, and intended that those two questions would be separable,” Collins said.
The plaintiffs in the lawsuit include Patricia Minerich, James Farrin, Virginia Farrin, Elizabeth Grant, Roy Tholl, Stephen Carbone, Pamela Mancusco and Daniel Zajdel, according to court documents.
Boothbay Region Elementary School is only one of 500 Maine schools built before 1980, and one of many in dire need of repairs. But without enough state funding and support from taxpayers, districts such as Boothbay’s get locked in stalemates, according to Maine School Management Association Executive Director Steve Bailey. The school buildings simply have to continue deteriorating.
“When you take a look at the age of some of the buildings, and over time, some of the windows, yes, have been replaced. But heating systems are not what they need to be. The buildings themselves were not necessarily structured to be energy efficient,” Bailey said. “And just infrastructure wise, they’re not set up to be schools where students can benefit in a maximum way in the 2020s.”
In February, Agnes Gray Elementary School in West Paris had to close due to unsafe conditions that included a failing roof, flooring in need of replacement and outdated plumbing. And just this month, Mountain Valley Middle School in Mexico closed abruptly after being deemed unsuitable for children.
The state offers funding for repairs, but it’s based on need, Bailey said. Only five to nine schools are awarded funding each cycle, which can take up to seven years. Otherwise, schools must sit on a waitlist that can have more than 70 buildings on it. If a school experiences a catastrophe, like the 2022 fire at Dike-Newell Elementary School in Bath, that school will get bumped up the waitlist, bumping others down.
In the last round of funding in 2018 nine schools received funding out of a list of 74.
Gov. Janet Mills signed an executive order on Oct. 4 to establish a commission to conduct a review of school construction and renovation financing across the state and come up with new ideas for funding these projects. The commission will have to finalize a report by April 25, 2025, that includes statewide school repair and construction needs and details on how other states fund such work.
Bailey said ideas from the commission could lead to different ways of financing the school repair fund, such as through tax increases rather than loans, but it will likely take years before any changes are made.
Boothbay Region Elementary School doesn’t have years.
Superintendent Robert Kahler said if the judge in the lawsuit doesn’t make a decision in the next two months, the district will miss its bid window and have to push back the project. And, for every year the project is delayed, it will cost up to $3 million more, he added.
The petitioners know this. Minerich, one of the eight petitioners in the lawsuit, concurred with Collins that if the district were truly worried about time, it would present an alternative to the taxpayers.
“They have shown no willingness to talk about an alternative, let alone do anything about it,” Minerich said.
The petitioners believe the necessary repairs can be completed for around $10 million. A group of 29 people bought an advertisement in the Boothbay Register on March 14 urging residents to vote “no” on the $30 million referendum and claimed the necessary repairs could cost $10 million, citing 2021 estimates by Lavallee Brensinger Architects.
Minerich said she knows it’s just an estimate, but claims that the repairs can be made at the elementary school without expanding it, and for far less than $30 million.
Lance Whitehead, the architect with Lavallee Brensinger Architects working on the Boothbay Region Elementary project, said that number was taken out of context.
The needed repairs, which include a new sprinkler and plumbing system — both of which are past their lifespan — safety and code compliance, reorganizing to separate middle schoolers from elementary schoolers, a more secure entrance and more, cannot be completed for $10 million, Whitehead said.
“Obviously, phasing is a big deal in occupied schools to ensure that contractors and students are separated and the students are separated from construction activities for safety,” Whitehead said.
Without the addition, middle schoolers would still be learning alongside kindergartners, and students would either have to be placed into portable classrooms during construction or contractors would have to complete the repairs only in the summer, which would take nine to 12 years, Whitehead said.
With the $30 million bond that includes the addition, the project would take three years, he said.
The school faced the consequences of letting its problems go unrepaired firsthand in February 2023, when old sprinkler systems were damaged by extreme cold and flooded 10 classrooms, the kitchen and half the cafeteria.
The parts of the school that were damaged by the flood have since been repaired — the old, cracked tiles contrast with the new floors throughout the school’s hallways. But students and teachers were displaced while the school had to be repaired.
This is the situation that Kahler, Kurr and Facilities Manager Dave Benner want to avoid by repairing the elementary school, and they maintain that they need the $30 million approved by Boothbay-region taxpayers to do it.
“That’s my biggest fear now, is that either the fuel tanks are gonna let go and the building will be unusable, or the sprinkler system will get shut down, and then what do we do?” Benner said.
