By Terry Karkos,Staff Writer

DIXFIELD – It’s official. Sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders of SAD 21 at Peru School are to join their counterparts from Canton, Carthage and Dixfield next school year at T.W. Kelly Dirigo Middle School in Dixfield.

At Monday night’s SAD 21 Consolidated School Board meeting, directors unanimously OK’d merging the classes. That means, for the 2005-06 school year, Peru School will be for kindergarten to fifth grade.

But prior to discussing the matter, directors first had to vote to allow the topic to be added to Monday night’s agenda. It was missing from the printed agenda.

Once that was done, Dirigo Middle School Principal Thomas Starratt explained that such a move would be more equitable to all SAD 21 students. Peru merged with SAD 21 last spring.

Starratt said that by merging Peru’s middle schoolers, they would have access to band, gym, home economics and industrial arts offerings.

Dirigo Middle School currently has 243 students. Peru has 50 students of middle school age.

SAD 21 Superintendent Thomas Ward said Dirigo Middle School has a capacity for 295 students.

Starratt suggested adding a double-wide portable classroom for the fifth-graders.

By the fall of 2008, district officials expect to open a new 300-pupil elementary school, the configuration of which is leaning toward prekindergarten to fifth grade.

Several parents from Dixfield, Canton and Peru joined the discussion, with some from Dixfield objecting to class sizes that they believed would become larger that the current ones.

But, Starratt said, merging Peru students would come with teachers, so the ratio of students per teacher would be 17-to-1 with sixth grade, 17.75-to-1 in seventh grade, and 21.25-to-1 in eighth grade.

After the vote, a group of Canton parents asked directors to begin discussions about merging Canton Elementary School students with Peru Elementary School students for next year.

But Ward said that such a move would involve a lengthy process, because it would mean closing the Canton school, something to which he said he would not commit without first holding informational meetings in Canton to gauge public opinion.

At one point, before Peru’s merging with SAD 21, a large number of Canton residents were seriously considering leaving SAD 21 if the district intended to close their school.

Directors asked Ward to gather information about the matter for next month’s meeting.