RAYMOND – The potential consolidation of the Windham and Jordan-Small middle schools and other concerns have some Raymond residents, including a recently elected selectwoman, calling for the break-up of Regional School Unit 14.
At a public retreat held by the Raymond Board of Selectmen on Nov. 18, Teresa Sadak, who won election convincingly to the board in June, raised concerns about the RSU 14 Middle School Facilities Advisory Committee, a new subcommittee that is expected to recommend, potentionally, in the next few months that the School Board approve the construction of a new consolidated middle school.
“At the retreat, I said, ‘I’m going to drop the bomb again,’” Sadak said in an interview last week. “‘I’m going to bring up the school issue again’… I said, ‘I am concerned. The RSU School Board has put together a committee, and it’s a new middle school facility committee.’”
“I said – full disclosure – I am ready for a divorce,” Sadak said.
The charge of the new advisory committee, which met for the first time on Oct. 17, is to “investigate and consider” additions or renovations to the current RSU 14 middle schools, as well as to “compare any proposed changes to the existing middle schools to that of a new, consolidated middle school that supports high-performing, middle-level educational programming in an efficient and cost-effective manner.”
In an interview, Sadak said she believes she could obtain the 227 signatures necessary to force a referendum on withdrawal.
“If I sent out a petition, I don’t think I’d have a problem at all,” she said.
Sadak said she is concerned that middle school consolidation would drive up the Raymond school budget, and force Raymond middle school students into Windham.
“If you place this school in Windham, does that mean that you close down Jordan-Small and bus all the Raymond kids to Windham?” Sadak said. “And that’s what people are having an issue with. They don’t have a problem busing kids down from Raymond to Windham, but they have a problem busing kids from Windham to Raymond, because Windham kids don’t want to come to Raymond. That’s what the whole issue is. Windham parents don’t want their kids going to Raymond schools.”
“Then our taxes go up and pay for a middle school that we don’t necessarily need,” Sadak said. “And to pay for a brand new middle school without any state assistance is going to be digging deep in people’s pockets.”
Sadak is not alone in her complaints. Mary Guiseley, a 24-year Raymond resident, said that there is no good reason to scrap the Jordan-Small Middle School.
“My view is that if there is availability and room for students to attend the Raymond middle school, then why should they build a new Windham school?” Guiseley said. “Why not just transport the kids in Windham to Raymond, as in Raymond we have to transport our kids to the Windham schools. If it’s a matter of they just don’t want their kids going to school in Raymond, and Raymond being part of the district, then they could select sending their kid to a private school of their choice with their money, not the district’s money.”
Tacy Hartley, a longtime Raymond resident who substitute teaches at School Administrative District 61, said that she was never convinced RSU 14 was a good idea.
“I did not believe in it in the first place,” Hartley said. “If it isn’t costly now, it is going to get much, much, much costlier. I’m worried about my taxes. They want to close down our schools in Raymond, jam our middle schools into temporary units down there around the junior high, and then build a completely new campus.”
According to Assistant Superintendent Donn Davis, who sits on the new advisory committee, the Jordan-Small Middle School has 188 students, with a capacity of 350 students, while the Windham Middle School has 593 students, with a capacity of 483 students. Approximately 160 overflow students from Windham Middle School attend the Field-Allen School next door.
In an interview, Davis stressed that there had been “absolutely no decision made” on a potential middle school consolidation yet.
“I think it’s going to depend on what they learn,” he said, referring to the advisory committee.
According to an executive facilities planning summary composed by Davis, the Windham Middle School, which is more than 30 years old, has “small,” 635 square-foot classrooms, and is “not a particularly well-built building with poor energy and engineering features.” The Raymond schools “have a low utilization rate because of declining populations,” according to the summary, which projects that the size of the Raymond student body will decline from 602 in 2013 to 510 in 2022.
According to the summary, in 2010, the RSU 14 School Board recommended the idling of the Manchester Primary School and Jordan-Small Middle School, but decided against the recommendation “after ample public participation.”
“However, there was informal School Board consensus that strategic planning for district facilities would need to be pursued to determine future recommendations of this nature,” the summary reads.
According to Davis’ summary, another School Board subcommittee, the Strategic Facilities Building/Planning Committee, contracted with PDT, a Portland-based architectural firm, “to review the design capabilities of the Windham Middle School for the purpose of considering remodeling that site to accommodate both the Jordan-Small Middle School and Windham Middle School student populations.”
That committee ultimately “agreed that the long-term facilities plan should be to consider the construction of a consolidated middle school and that a preliminary/tentative proposal would be communicated to a community stakeholder committee,” according to the summary.
Catriona Sangster, a Raymond resident and chairwoman of the School Board, said middle school consolidation would result in the construction of an entirely new facility.
“If there was a consolidation we would be having a whole new middle school,” Sangster said. “There would be no Windham Middle School and there would be no Jordan-Small Middle School …. We cannot fit all the population in either of those buildings.”
Sangster, who is also a member of the new advisory committee, said that a dissolution of RSU 14 could be quite costly.
“A lot of effort has gone into our consolidating – time and money,” Sangster said. “If people are looking from a purely financial standpoint, it would drain our resources that would otherwise go toward kids, toward legal expenses to try to accomplish this goal of divorcing. In addition, our structure is now set up so that we are consolidated, so we would have to as a town recreate a whole new system, which I think would bear a huge cost. So it’s not financially prudent.”
Sangster also stressed the benefits of having the two towns sharing educational resources.
“Also, we’re a very, very small town and we benefit from being a part of another town,” she said. “Two towns together, being able to share resources, being able to have curriculum meetings across the district so that all your fifth-grade teachers from both Jordan-Small Middle School and Manchester School get together.”
Sadak is one of 42 members of a Facebook group, “Dissolution of RSU 14,” which is “intended to channel the energy of all people interested in dissolving the union of the Windham and Raymond schools in an attempt to research the process and outcomes, and, hopefully, move forward with the procedure,” according to the group’s mission statement.
Heather Keene, a Raymond resident who started the group in the spring, said that so far, there have been few concrete steps taken toward forcing a referendum on withdrawal.
“I haven’t gotten the feeling that anyone’s really willing to do anything about it,” Keene said. “Everybody’s got their opinion, and a lot of people think it’s something that should happen. But I put that out there, and there is not a whole lot of responses of people actually stepping up to do anything.”
Although she isn’t happy about a potential middle school consolidation, Keene’s biggest concerns are growing class sizes in Raymond, and the fact that due to proportional representation on the School Board, Raymond has a limited say in RSU 14 decisions. She hopes that Sadak’s election to the board will give new momentum to the embryonic school district dissolution campaign.
“I know it’s something she feels strongly about it,” Keene said. “I feel like with her on the board of selectmen I’m hoping that more people will step forward willing to do the leg work to get this going.”
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