Winterport middle school proposal wins wide approval

WINTERPORT — In a straw vote Tuesday, residents from Hampden, Newburgh, and Winterport overwhelmingly approved continuing the process to establish a middle school in Winterport as part of the district’s two middle schools project.

In the second straw vote of the evening, residents approved locating the second school in Hampden, but away from the high-density center of town where three schools already are located.

Nearly 70 people attended the meeting at the Leroy H. Smith School which was the first of two public informational programs held to discuss the status of school construction projects. The second meeting will be held 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, March 28, at Hampden’s Earl C. McGraw School.

The straw votes taken during the meetings will be submitted to the State Board of Education as part of the application and review process for construction of the two schools.

SAD 22 School Superintendent Carlton Dubois said that the Winterport school could receive concept approval by the state board as early as this July. The construction could go before a public referendum next fall and could be built and in use by September 1992. The school in Hampden, which would also serve Newburgh pupils, could be approved in 1992 or 1993 and be in place a year later, he said.

This is not the first time the middle school question has gone before residents. In September and November of 1988, referendums for a $7.9 million central middle school failed by votes of 1,053 to 825 and 2,679 to 2,400.

The cost of the two proposed middle schools would be about the same as the amount requested under the single middle school. With the estimated $3 million cost for the Winterport school, Dubois said, the district should be near the circuit breaker point at which the state steps in and pays the remainder of the construction costs.

Dubois presented statistics and projections to the residents as to how much the additional schools are needed. Among them:

The district currently has 15 classes in portable buildings and next year nine additional classrooms have been requested. Dubois said the buildings cost the district $79,000 this year to lease.

The Smith School has a capacity to hold about 350 pupils but currently there are 523 pupils in the school. Four of the additional classrooms have been requested for the Smith School.

Residents voted 67-0 with one abstention to authorize the SAD 22 board of directors to continue with establishing the Winterport school. Earlier in the evening, the Winterport Town Selectmen signed the deed to 30 acres of land — behind the town’s recreational area — over to the board of directors.

In the second straw vote, 22 residents approved moving the Hampden-Newburgh school away from the original location — across from the Hampden Post Office — and into a less-developed area. Only four had supported keeping the original site, with the remainder of the residents having abstained from the vote or had left the meeting. Some of the areas being looked into include the Patterson and Meadow roads areas.

Also discussed during the meeting was a construction project at Hampden Academy. Dubois said an additions project is expected to be filed with the state by 1991 to deal with the population problem the school faces now and in the future. The school already has more students than its 650-student-capacity, and projections show the school will have more than 800 students by 1994-95.

“It will keep climbing up from there and by 1994-95 we’ll be in trouble,” he said.