Peninsula School teams to be known as Bulldogs

WINTER HARBOR – There’s a new name on the Schoodic Peninsula to go along with the new partnership between Winter Harbor and Gouldsboro.

Now that the two towns have combined their school departments, children in kindergarten through grade eight will call themselves the Bulldogs when they suit up for school sporting events in their new black and silver uniforms.

It’s one of a couple of changes in store for the Peninsula School, which in September is expected to welcome an estimated 190 pupils from Gouldsboro and Winter Harbor through its doors, according to Marielle Edgecomb, the school’s principal. The consolidated school will occupy the former Winter Harbor Grammar School building in the village of Winter Harbor.

Edgecomb, while vacationing Thursday in New Hampshire, said Winter Harbor selectmen have decided to allow school officials to paint a new Bulldogs logo over the old Beavers mascot logo in the gym of the town-owned building.

“That’s a big deal,” the principal said. “I think that was a tough decision to make.”

The old mascot for Gouldsboro pupils, before they moved out of their mold-infested school building on Route 195 in Gouldsboro last December, was the Panthers.

Peninsula CSD officials recently approved the new Bulldogs mascot and colors from a list of roughly 25 proposed names and colors drafted by pupils this past spring.

Besides the new mascot, there also should be more elbowroom in the cramped Winter Harbor school when classes resume at the end of the summer, according to the principal. A new portable building with two classrooms is expected to be erected behind the school, which will allow administrators to reassign uses inside the main building.

“That will hopefully be installed before school starts,” Edgecomb said of the portable structure.

Edgecomb said that after Gouldsboro pupils moved in last year, special education programs were held in a space formerly used for storage. With the new portable building, those programs will get their own classroom and the old storage space will be used again for storage, she said.

Also, the library, which last spring often was used for more than one kind of class, will function this year as a library and as an art classroom, according to the principal.

Some classrooms last spring had two teachers because of staff redundancies between the two schools, which were not officially consolidated until July 1. With consolidation, some teaching positions between the two towns have been eliminated to reduce the number of teachers to one per classroom.

Despite the cuts, school officials have decided to add a guidance counselor position to the school staff, which did not exist during the 2003-04 academic year, Edgecomb said.