Plans call for almost doubling the size of the 50-year-old building.
LEWISTON – School officials will take plans for a $9.5 million expansion of Farwell Elementary to neighbors and parents next week.
School Superintendent Leon Levesque and members of the school Building Committee presented their plans to a joint meeting of the City Council and Planning Board Tuesday.
Plans calls for almost doubling the size of the 50-year-old building to make room for 400 students. The school now has 327 students.
“We want to design a building that will serve the education needs of students for the next 50 years,” Levesque said. “The current building does not do that.”
Farwell has 14 classrooms, a multipurpose room, a small kitchen, two offices, a teachers’ room and two restrooms. In all, the school has about 83 square feet of space per student, while state guidelines call for 125 square feet per student.
That has forced students and teachers to make do, said John Butler, building committee co-chairman.
“They store things where they ought not, like in the boiler room and in hallways,” Butler said.
He said the building is also starting to show wear. Walls are cracked, ceilings, doors and the electrical and heating systems all need to be replaced or upgraded.
The state Department of Education agreed to fund 46 percent of the cost of the expansion in June 2002, naming the school the 10th neediest in Maine. The building committee began meeting in December 2002, Levesque said.
The committee will present a site design at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 3, at the school. A straw vote on the site selection is scheduled for the following week, at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday, Feb. 10. If the people attending agree, the committee will continue working on building designs.
A second straw vote on the building design is scheduled for June. Voters will be asked to support a bond issue for the project in November.
Construction will begin in June 2006 and wrap up in August 2007, if everything goes as planned, Levesque said.
staylor@sunjournal.com
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