Christian school set to open Orrington’s Calvary Chapel also plans multipurpose building

ORRINGTON – Less than six months after they moved into their new home, members of Calvary Chapel are getting ready to open a Christian school and construct a 1,400-square-foot multipurpose building.

Calvary Chapel Christian School is set to open Sept. 3, said Robert Seccareccia, an assistant pastor who in June left a 17-year career with the Bangor School Department to become the new school’s principal.

Just before the move to Orrington in March, Senior Pastor Kenneth Graves said a school was “inevitable” because Calvary Chapel members comprise the state’s largest home-schooling population.

Seccareccia, who holds a master’s degree in education, said this week that he and Graves, who founded the local Calvary Chapel affiliate with his wife, Jeannine, began discussing a school about six years ago.

The needed pieces, however, didn’t begin to fall into place until last December, when Calvary bought the former North Orrington School building at 154 River Road, or Route 15. The fact that the building was built to serve as a school was a real plus, Seccareccia said.

“We took it as a sign that the Lord wanted us to do this,” he said.

Built in 1924, the school housed the community’s kindergarten through fifth-grade pupils. It had been empty for a few years when Calvary members, who had been leasing space in nearby Bangor, decided it was time to find a home of their own.

Seccareccia said the school would serve pupils from preschool through high school. As of this week, enrollment stood at about 70, with some pupils coming from as far as Corinth. Applications are still arriving.

The core faculty has been lined up, he said, and the school will use the A Beka Curriculum, widely used in private schools and by home-schooled students.

Because the school, private and religious, isn’t eligible for state aid, operating funds will come from tuition and financial support from members, he said. The tuition rate is $2,750 a year, $2,500 for the children of members. Seccareccia said families in need of tuition assistance could apply to the Maine Children’s Scholarship Fund.

Calvary Chapel also is working to obtain the needed permits for a 140-foot-by-100-foot multi-purpose building, which will be located behind the existing school building.

The multipurpose structure will serve mainly as a gym for the school but it also will be used for worship services, said Assistant Pastor Brian Burke, who’s in charge of that project. The goal is to break ground by late summer or fall of this year.

Calvary Chapel Bangor, arguably the fastest-growing church in the region, is an affiliate, or branch, of the original Calvary Chapel founded in Costa Mesa, Calif., by Chuck Smith, who went on to become a leader in the 1970s Jesus Movement. Today, Calvary has affiliates in more than 40 states and various other countries.

Known for its down-to-earth worship style, the local Calvary affiliate started small, with fewer than a dozen worshippers at its first services a decade ago. Today, it has a membership of about 1,000 adults.

Though the organization is tax-exempt, its purchase agreement with the town of Orrington provides for an annual payment in lieu of taxes. One of the town’s stipulations for the sale was that it always produce revenue from either taxes or fees for town services.