LEVANT — The new Levant Consolidated School surely will not stick out like a sore thumb in this community.

In fact, architects from WBRC Architects and Engineers of Bangor have made sure that the building blends right in with the rest of the town’s rural farm-based backdrop.

With a silo-like reading room standing adjacent to the library/media center and a multipurpose room which, from the outside, resembles an antiquated barn, the new school — scheduled for a September 1997 opening — will fit in nicely with its surroundings.

“That’s something we really wanted to do,” Superintendent Paul Whitney said, referring to the town’s rural heritage.

In addition to the library and multipurpose room, the first floor of the school also will contain classrooms for grades kindergarten to three. There also will be a special education room and an art room.

On the second floor, above the other classrooms, will be rooms for grades four and five and a computer writing lab.

The new $4.8 million school was approved by voters from SAD 23 (Carmel and Levant) back in September by a resounding 332-64 margin. The facility will house Levant pupils from kindergarten to fourth grade and fifth-graders from both Carmel and Levant. A total enrollment of 300 students can be met at the new school.

Currently, bid specifications are being established and the project is expected to go out to bid soon.

“We hope to be ready to award the contract as early as the last of February,” Whitney said. “We’re hoping construction can begin sometime in April.”

The ground-breaking ceremony will end eight years of the communities’ talking about and dreaming of the project.

“It’s very exciting,” Whitney said. “Many people have worked very hard on this. People from the school and the community have worked together on this project.”

In the meantime, Whitney said, the district’s building committee is working out a gameplan “pertaining to the technology issues and certainly the interior design of the building itself.”

The current school, which is 40 years old, is overcrowded and has been plagued with plumbing problems.

“For several years we’ve had more students in two portable units than we’ve had in the actual [current school] building,” Whitney said last summer.