DIXFIELD – The 960 students in SAD 21 will find changes in personnel and facilities when they return to classes at 8 a.m. Aug, 27.

All kindergarten through fifth-graders will go to classes in a new school perched atop a boulder-lined hill in Peru.

Middle schoolers will have more elbow room at their school off Weld Street because the fifth-graders will no longer be there.

Some high school students taking French, Spanish or social studies will walk several hundred feet to the former elementary school for classes in what has been dubbed, Dirigo High School East.

And the dozen or so high school alternative education students will have their own space in what had previously served as a library in the former elementary school.

Administrators and other staff will be housed at the former elementary school instead of being scattered around the district.

“Each school and the central office is gaining space. Having more space has a calming effect,” Superintendent Tom Ward said.

John Glaus, a long-term substitute Spanish teacher last year, is the district’s new French teacher. On Monday, he was busy preparing his classroom at Dirigo High School East by hanging French-inspired posters and sorting through the various levels of French textbooks.

“I think it’s tremendous that they put social studies and languages together. We’re all in this small enclave,” he said as he attached a poster of the Chateau Frontenac to the wall.

Katherine Harvey, the district’s grants manager, is now a part of the central office. She, and several other administrators, had been housed in the former Richardson Hollow building complex on Pine Street.

“We’re in with other people. We’re not so isolated,” she said. “We’re pretty blessed to be here.”

She shares a large former classroom with the Parent Place, a program of the Child Health Center that rents the space from SAD 21.

Ward’s office is about 10 times the size of the office he occupied in a small, ranch-type building next to the high school. There’s plenty of room for a conference table for the district’s various committees to meet. His office, as well as those of the business manager and others, are also large enough to accommodate a possible change as central office for a new Western Foothills School District consolidation of SADs 21, 43 and 39.

Residents of those three districts vote on the possible administrative merger in November.

The former central office now houses a social worker, the in-school suspension program, and a learning lab, which is a place where students can receive tutoring when they don’t have a class.

“Everything has fallen together,” Ward said.

District teachers return to school for two workshop days on Aug. 25 and 26.