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After weeks of debate, Bangor families and school officials are beginning to coalesce around a plan for the Fairmount School community when its building closes next year for repairs.
The School Committee will vote next week on a plan for next year after the school department backed down from an earlier plan to reorganize several grade levels during the temporary closure.
Support is growing for the department to create a “school within a school” for Fairmount fourth and fifth graders next year in a wing of Bangor High School.
While many families say the high school plan is the best of several imperfect options, questions remain unanswered about how long it will last and whether students will ever return to Fairmount after unexpected asbestos was found in the school’s ceiling.
Preliminary estimates also indicate that repairing Fairmount could take longer than one year. Contractor Scott Dunbar told the department that the project could cost around $5.6 million and take 12 to 18 months, school administrators reported at a workshop Tuesday night.
The support for the new plan comes after the department and the superintendent have faced backlash over the last month for their communication around potential options for next year and an initial plan to move forward with a decision before holding community listening sessions. Beyond the immediate decision for Fairmount students next year, many families are also frustrated by the lack of clarity around the district’s long-term plans.
The high school plan is one of three revised options that Superintendent Marie Robinson laid out in community listening sessions Monday night.
The first option would move all fourth graders to the Mary Snow School, move fifth graders up a year early to William S. Cohen School or James F. Doughty School, and send all eighth graders to Bangor High School.
That plan could require some new teacher certifications, and it would cost about $138,000 for staffing and to add playground equipment to the middle schools, Robinson said at a School Committee workshop Tuesday night.
Option two would relocate Fairmount students and staff to the high school’s lower A wing. The school department would spend about $205,000 to section off the fourth and fifth grades from the high school by adding new security doors and partitions and to add a playground.
The third option is the only remaining plan from an earlier list of proposals and would move all fourth graders to Mary Snow, move all fifth and sixth graders to Doughty and move all seventh and eighth graders to Cohen. That option came with an updated price tag of $200,000 due to renovations to Doughty’s science labs and adding a playground there.
All three options would be much cheaper than some of the previously proposed multimillion-dollar options, like housing Fairmount School in portable classrooms — a plan that was scrapped after school officials learned they would not be able to secure portables until November, school committee member Ben Sprague said Tuesday night.
For all three options, the district’s bus contractor, Cyr, would be able to accommodate adjusted bus routes and keep school start and end times the same for all grade levels, Robinson said Tuesday. She also confirmed that no specials or extracurriculars would be eliminated under any proposed plan.
Option two is by far the most popular, based on feedback from students, teachers and families, Robinson reported. The plan would affect the fewest students and most closely maintain the community and support systems within Fairmount.
“I feel like the community, the students, the staff are interested in the least disruptive option,” Robinson said.
Some high school classes, mostly in the English department, would be displaced from the lower A wing and some teachers would share classrooms in other parts of the building, Paul Butler, the high school principal, said Tuesday.
“We would be happy to host if that’s the decision,” Butler said.
Several parents raised concerns Tuesday night about drug use and other behaviors at the high school that wouldn’t be developmentally appropriate for their young children to be exposed to, saying they didn’t believe it would be possible to fully separate the fourth and fifth graders.
Sarah Smith, a third and fourth grade parent, told school officials that she would pull her kids out of the district if option two was chosen, calling it “irresponsible and risky” and adding, “I cannot believe that we as a community are considering this.”
Some families were also concerned that it would be unfair for Fairmount students to have such a different educational experience next year compared with their peers in other schools.
School officials emphasized Tuesday that nearly all classes, activities and transportation for the Fairmount students would take place within their own wing, which would also have its own bathrooms. That wing would have its own entrance and exit, according to Butler.
Fairmount students would have their own buses, which would arrive at the wing’s entrance after the high school is already in session, according to Butler, since high school begins at 8 a.m. and fourth and fifth graders start at 9 a.m.
“I appreciate the concerns about mixing students,” Butler said, but he added that he doesn’t think it would be difficult to maintain a separate wing and that the plan presents opportunities for structured mentorship and extracurricular crossover between the high schoolers and the younger students.
Robinson also noted that other schools in the state house disparate grade levels in the same building, including Opal Myrick Elementary and Schenck High School in East Millinocket. Those schools have shared a building since 2011, and reports have indicated that the schools cohabitate well and that it introduced new tutoring opportunities.
Some parents said they preferred this model over option one because it’s easier to separate smaller children from high schoolers than it would be to isolate eighth graders, and because it wouldn’t be fair or developmentally appropriate for those students to miss out on their last year of middle school and skip to high school a year early.
Many families also worried that a one-year temporary Fairmount closure is not realistic, and Robinson acknowledged Tuesday that the process could take longer.
“With deferred maintenance in an old building, we do have some pretty significant decisions to make,” she said. “Those timelines sometimes get extended unexpectedly. So I don’t think there’s a hundred percent guarantee of anything.”
If the department moves forward with multimillion-dollar repairs to Fairmount, they would include fixing the roofs of the main building and the annex, fixing peeling paint, addressing water infiltration to the foundation of the building, replacing carpets, fixing a leak in the gym area, fixing the kitchen ceiling and adding alarms, removing an above-ground oil tank and replacing a boiler, including to estimates shared at Tuesday’s workshop.
Funding that renovation would require a bonding process, Heather Hale, the department’s director of business services, said Tuesday.
Butler told the School Committee Tuesday that keeping Fairmount students in the high school beyond one year would be possible, although not ideal.
Parent Megan Anderson, who has a fourth grader at Fairmount as well as a second grader, noted after Monday’s listening session that “the enduring rumor of all this is that there’s no chance that this is one year.”
She added, “I don’t think Fairmount will ever open again.”
