LEWISTON – Voters on Tuesday approved a $9.5 million plan for a new Farwell Elementary School.

In the first of two straw votes to be held on the project, 65 neighborhood residents, parents and taxpayers OK’d a plan that calls for the current school to be torn down and a school to be built in its place. No one voted against it.

The current Farwell school is 50 years old and in disrepair. Ceilings, floors and doors have to be replaced. Walls are cracked and insulation is minimal. The building is overcrowded, with inadequate classroom, storage and kitchen space for the 327 students in kindergarten through grade six.

In 2002, the Maine Department of Education named the school the 10th neediest in Maine.

The plan approved Tuesday calls for the current school to be replaced with a new building on the same 4.6-acre site. It would accommodate about 400 students.

The state would pay $4.6 million for the project while Lewiston would pay $4.9 million.

Tuesday’s straw vote included a short presentation by school officials and a question and answer session. But few audience members had questions and the vote was taken in less than an hour.

“It’s going to be a big headache for us during the year when you’re constructing. But we want to keep the school on this site,” said Marianne Miller, an abutter to the school, during the question and answer session. “To have a neighborhood school is a wonderful, wonderful thing.”

If voters hadn’t approved the plan Tuesday, Superintendent Leon Levesque said the school system would have had to reconsider repairing the school, expanding the building or building a new school on a site outside of the Farwell neighborhood.

But repairing and expanding the building would have cost Lewiston nearly as much money without the benefits of a new school. And building on a site outside of the Farwell area would have meant losing the neighborhood school.

The vote taken Tuesday allows school officials to move forward with the plan for a new school on the same site. Officials now must continue developing the plan and working with the Maine Department of Education. A second straw vote on the site selection is expected to be held in June.

Because the Farwell site is far short of the 9-acre minimum required by the state, Lewiston will still need a waiver from the Maine Board of Education to build a new school there.

A site presentation has been tentatively scheduled for March, with a vote on the school’s concept design in August.

A citywide referendum on the project is slated for this fall.

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