PORTLAND – The 103-year-old Nathan Clifford School in Portland won’t be torn down.
Nor will it be gobbled up by the nearby University of Southern Maine campus, as some residents of the Oakdale neighborhood had heard.
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But what will be done with the former elementary school remains unclear.
“It needs a new steward and a new life,” said Caroline Paras, chairwoman of the Nathan Clifford Re-Use Advisory Task Force.
The 17-member Task Force, formed in June by the City Council, hosted a public meeting Tuesday night to gather input from residents on the school’s future. About 30 people attended.
Using a new electronic polling system, attendees were able to vote — by clicking a button on a handheld device resembling a televison remote control — for the reuse options they supported. Their votes were tallied electronically and displayed on an overhead screen.
Those results, and the Task Force’s preferred reuse option, will be presented to members of the City Council’s Housing and Community Development Committee on Nov. 14.
The committee will then craft its own recommendation and present it to the full City Council for a final decision. Some at the meeting said the process seemed hurried, but Councilor Edward Suslovic assured them it was not.
“The longer that building sits empty the greater the chances it will deteriorate,” Suslovic said. “People want to see life restored to their neighborhood and this will do it.”
A University of Southern Maine spokesman said the school won’t be part of the university’s future plans.
“We’re really at a point where we need to be fiscally conservative, at least through the rest of this decade,” said university spokesman Robert Caswell, who also served on the task force. “At this time the university has no interest in taking over the school.”
Paras said the city does not want to tear the school down. The Clifford school, which opened April 1, 1909, was named after U.S. Supreme Court Justice Nathan Clifford.
It closed in February 2011 after the new Ocean Avenue Elementary School opened to replace it. The city took ownership this year after the school department declared the school surplus property.
The 44,000-square-foot building has a 500-seat auditorium, 16 classrooms, a gymnasium in its basement, and fireplaces in the principal’s office and teacher’s room.
Paras presented five broad reuse options: housing, education, commercial, community and mixed use.
Housing could cover several residential uses such as condominiums, apartments, senior housing, housing for people with disabilities or a student dormitory. Educational uses might include kindergarten classes, a charter school, teacher’s academy, adult education or a senior college.
Sixty-three percent of the audience indicated they would support a residential reuse of the school while 79 percent said they would support some type of educational use.
Task Force members say they will need more time to analyze the results before drafting a recommendation.
Staff Writer Dennis Hoey can be contacted at 791-6365 or at:
dhoey@pressherald.com
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