FARMINGTON – Organizations using the high school auditorium beginning July 1 will be asked to add a 50-cent seat replacement charge to admission fees.
SAD 9 directors voted unanimously Tuesday to accept Superintendent Michael Cormier’s proposal as a way to raise money to replace the aging seats.
The district received a $3,000 donation in December that has been set aside for the project.
There are more than 500 seats in the auditorium.
The seats are original, installed when Mount Blue High School was built in 1965.
They’ve begun to break, Cormier said.
It’s becoming difficult to find replacement parts, he added.
It costs $130 for each seat, including installation, the superintendent said.
Cormier estimated it would cost nearly $70,000 to replace all the seats.
Cormier said if people go to other auditoriums, there is usually an admission fee and a seat charge on the ticket.
Director Susan Roberts of Farmington asked if the concept of donating a seat with a name plate recognizing the person the seat was donated by had been explored.
It had been discussed in the past, Cormier said, but then there’re the issues of maintaining the seats and keeping track of who donated them.
Director Jo Josephson suggested that a plaque including all the names of people who donated seats might work better rather than nameplates on the seats.
The seats would most likely be replaced in sections, Cormier said.
Directors were also warned that the bleachers in the high school gymnasium also need to be replaced. The issue was discussed last year.
“We’ve got to get new bleachers,” Cormier said.
The existing bleachers are 35 years old and a machine is used to close and open them.
It would be best if the bleachers were replaced with electronically run bleachers, he said.
Another project the board should be thinking about, Cormier said is building a track on school grounds.
Most Class A schools this size have a track to hold events, he said.
Currently the district has to find other places to run the events and has to pay to lease a track.
The track would not come cheap, Cormier said, acknowledging it would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.
dperry@sunjournal.com
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