Seven years ago, the Bangor School Department commissioned a study that found the city’s school buildings needed millions of dollars in repairs — and recommended that several close completely.
“Some of our buildings, you can only put so many coats of paint on them,” then-Bangor schools Superintendent Betsy Webb said. “It really is time to say that in the next decade, they may need to be fully gutted and renovated.”
Little has changed in the years since. No major renovations have been performed on the school’s aging facilities, two of which are more than 100 years old.
In fact, the biggest project during that time was the $5 million upgrade of Cameron Stadium, which included expanding the track and installing a turf field. Voters approved a $2.73 million bond toward that effort.
Bangor officials have known for years that the city’s aging school buildings need millions of dollars worth of renovations, but the department has struggled to secure funding amid a statewide backlog of repairs. Now, the city is facing an accelerated urgency to address maintenance after the school department found asbestos in its oldest school, forcing its temporary closure.
The needed repairs to the city’s schools “really should have been addressed many years ago,” Superintendent Marie Robinson said at a School Committee meeting Wednesday. “There’s been deferred maintenance based on budgetary considerations and multiple schools need multiple upgrades, and that’s where we are right now.”
Fairmount School will close next year to address the asbestos, Robinson said at the meeting, but it’s unclear where west side fourth and fifth graders will go next year or what will happen after. Students and staff don’t need to move immediately because the asbestos is undisturbed, meaning it can’t be breathed in, the department has said.
The department released five options for next year’s relocation plan Friday after facing criticism from parents who feel it hasn’t been proactive enough in communicating with the public. The Bangor Daily News reported on the asbestos findings and the closure after teachers received a memo Tuesday, before the department informed families.
Beyond those concerns about transparency and the uncertainty now felt by students who don’t know where they’ll be attending school next year, families have suggested that the crisis moment could also be an opportunity to bridge a divide between schools on the east and west sides of the city as the community evaluates how the Fairmount closure fits into a broader plan to permanently reorganize the district.
“School reorganization has been part of that discussion for as long as I have been in Bangor,” former School Committee Chair Marwa Hassanien, who has been in the city for 20 years, said.
A 2019 study commissioned by the department recommended significant renovations or consolidation to the city’s schools.
One plan involved keeping and repairing all existing schools, or even rebuilding the Downeast School, with a price tag at the time between $80 and $90 million.
The other two options would both involve shutting down Fairmount and Mary Snow, the two oldest school buildings, and reorganizing the rest of the district to accommodate those students. James F. Doughty School would house all the city’s fourth and fifth graders, and William S. Cohen would be expanded and converted into the city’s only middle school. That would’ve cost between $115 million and $119 million because of needed repairs and expansion to the remaining schools.
Just accounting for inflation alone, that price range today would be between $105 million and $156 million.
The 2019 study cost the department $170,000.
Bangor schools applied last year for major school construction funding from the Maine Department of Education for Fairmount, Mary Snow and Downeast schools, in line with goals outlined in the department’s 10-year strategic plan, according to department spokesperson Ray Phinney.
But none of the three schools were given high enough priority to receive funding.
Out of 95 schools in the state that applied in that cycle, only two were approved for funding — schools in Bath and Frenchville that either fully or partially burned down in the last five years.
As of last year, Fairmount School needed more than $6 million in repairs, with HVAC replacement listed as the top priority project in a draft of the department’s five-year capital maintenance plan obtained by the BDN. Other costly fixes included replacing air vents and aged steam piping and renovating the front entrance and drop-off and pickup areas.
Mary Snow required more than $7 million worth of renovations, according to that plan.
“Like many communities across Maine, we’re facing the reality of aging school infrastructure and in some cases, buildings that no longer meet safety or educational standards. The situation at Fairmount brings that into focus,” Hassanien said.
It would take $11 billion to replace or fix all of the Maine schools that need repairs, according to a report issued earlier this year by the Governor’s Commission on School Construction.
Bangor’s school department found the asbestos at Fairmount on Feb. 20, according to Phinney, while responding to a water leak at the school. Every school in the city has asbestos in it, like most American schools built before the 1980s, and the department has a federally required plan that details locations within the schools where asbestos-containing materials have been identified.
But this material, found in Fairmount School’s ceiling plaster, had not been found previously, because it exists in a skim coat on the ceiling and not in the sheet rock itself, according to Phinney.
“Every time that we start construction, we do an assessment beforehand, and that’s when we discovered it,” he said earlier this week.
The school department does not yet know how much it will cost to address the asbestos issue at Fairmount, since it needs to wait until the school is closed to do an “evaluation of the full extent of the issue,” Phinney said.
Experts say the cost of asbestos abatement can vary greatly. Removing the material from just one classroom could cost around $6,000 to $10,000, according to Kevin Pratt, owner of the Turner-based Acadia Contractors, which provides asbestos removal services.
Removing asbestos from an entire school of Fairmount’s size could cost up to half a million dollars, according to a rough ballpark estimate by Pratt.
Federal regulations around asbestos are especially strict in schools, which is part of the reason why these services are so expensive, Pratt said. This is because asbestosis, the lung tissue scarring that can occur after asbestos exposure, can take 25 to 30 years to develop, so kids with long lives ahead of them are much more likely to be affected.
Contractors take painstaking steps to take out all the toxic materials, seal off windows, doors and vents, and prevent workers from inhaling asbestos or bringing it outside of the affected area, Pratt said. Workers have to use a new suit every time they enter the area and shower every time they leave. Training employees to handle this work safely, as well as sending the materials to a lab for testing, can drive up costs.
Parents at Wednesday’s School Committee meeting demanded better communication from the department around next year’s reorganization and took issue with its initial plan to decide where Fairmount students will go with little community input.
“I am absolutely horrified by the communication of this messaging,” parent Christina Murphy said at the meeting, adding that the lack of communication from the department about a plan to move students next year caused panic for kids and families.
Megan Anderson said that the closure could further burden west side schools if they become responsible for absorbing Fairmount students, widening “the ever-growing disparity between the east and west sides of our city.” For years, families have perceived east side schools as richer, more resourced and simply better than west side schools.
“This closure presents an opportunity for the school administration and the school committee to respond to the east-west disparity that plagues our city,” Anderson said.
Robinson briefly outlined her perspective on the events during her four-minute superintendent’s report Wednesday, noting that “this was an unexpected situation that occurred.”
“I do deeply understand the disruption,” she added later in the meeting. “This is a significant process in an accelerated timeline. So, I will apologize for the fact that there hasn’t been extensive communication at this point.”
School administrators are working on a temporary reorganization plan that will place Fairmount students elsewhere next year and asked staff and families Friday to share their feedback and ideas in a survey that will close at 7 p.m. on May 5.
“It is extremely important to take this next year to thoroughly assess and determine, is this something that can be revitalized?” Robinson said Wednesday.
Some of the five possibilities for next year shared on Friday are similar to plans outlined in the 2019 study, suggesting that wherever Fairmount students end up next year could be adapted to a more permanent reorganization of the school system.
School administrators will present a short-term reorganization plan for next year at the May 13 School Committee meeting. The department also plans to hold public listening sessions on May 18, from 5 to 6 p.m. at Doughty and 6:30 to 7:30 p.m. at Cohen.
The announcement of the closure comes during the city’s budget season, with school officials set to present a proposed budget to city councilors on May 7 at 5:15 p.m.
“Councilors really have to think carefully about approving budgets that sustain and modernize our school facilities, because delaying those investments often leads to more urgent situations down the line. Hence the case we’re in now,” Hassanien said.
Last year, the council rejected the initial school budget proposal and asked the department to trim it.
School Committee member Katie Brydon encouraged families on Wednesday to reach out to their city councilors about the school budget.
“We’ve been understanding that these buildings are old for some time, but every spring we are here meeting with the city and being told we have to make a cut,” she said.
