WEST PARIS — The principal of Legion Memorial Elementary School said Wednesday that the community will miss the school if it closes, but Superintendent Mark Eastman said doing so would save the Oxford Hills School District about $40,000.

Those savings are a small dent in the more than $2 million in revenue the district is losing in 2010-11, he said Wednesday. “Two million is just an unbelievable number,” he said. The district is expected to lose another $2 million in fiscal year 2011-12.

To compensate for those losses next year, school officials are proposing a series of short-term and long-term measures that would save about $750,000. One measure is to cut the number of elementary school principals from eight to three: One for Paris, West Paris and Hebron; one for Norway, Waterford and Harrison; and one for Oxford and Otisfield.

Parents of West Paris students were told Tuesday night that under the proposal, which must be approved by the Board of Directors, Agnes Gray Elementary School Principal Melanie Ellsworth would be an associate principal. She would travel between Paris Elementary School, where the 26 West Paris fifth- and sixth-graders would go, and Agnes Gray school where kindergarten through grade four students would be housed.

Eastman said Wednesday that closing Legion Memorial School in West Paris, where there are 28 kindergarten and first-grade students, would save $30,000 for an anticipated new boiler and another $10,000 in operating costs. He said the district would hope to rent the building to a day care business or after-school program.

“I think that there are many positive things about it,” said Ellsworth, who is also principal of Legion Memorial School. “There’s a lot of lost time tracking back and forth for the children” who walk between the two schools for meals and special classes.

“There will be savings of time and safety,” she said.

Eastman said there are many pluses to the proposed changes, including the ability to keep an elementary school open in each of the district’s eight communities and having more efficient and same-size classes

The changes would cut about $500,000 in instructional costs and $250,000 in administrative costs, much of which Eastman said he hopes to accomplish through attrition.

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