To get to lunch at White Rock School in Gorham, students from portable classrooms crawl through an outside gate before filing into the main building where they eat.

With a shortage of hooks, some of their coats were left piled in a heap in the school’s lobby. And there’s not enough room for all students to eat lunch in the cafeteria, which doubles as a gym, so many students have to take their lunch back to class.

“We were told it’s the most crowded school by square footage in the state,” said Margaret Evans, principal of White Rock School.

The White Rock School is No. 10 on a state list of schools most in need of improvement. The Gorham School Committee will discuss appointing a project committee, the first step to solving the overcrowding, when it meets at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 14, in the high school auditorium. A project committee would be a forerunner for a building committee.

School Committee Chairman Jim Hager is optimistic that help is on the way. But just what shape that help would come in is unclear now.

“The state will determine whether we renovate or build new,” Hager said.

A cramped history

Overcrowding at the White Rock School is not new. There have been portable classrooms there for 18 years.

White Rock School was built in 1962 as a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school with a capacity for 87 students. Enrollment swelled to 160 students two years ago. It has dropped to 140 students since then. Classroom space has never been added to the main building, Evans said.

To reach the cafeteria, children in classrooms housed in portable buildings, which sit on posts, have to go outside and crawl through a schoolyard gate.

“They’re good at it,” said Patty LaRosa, a second-grade teacher.

The gate went up a couple of years ago as a roadblock to stop motorists from cutting between the school and the portables, as a shortcut between adjacent roads.

Once inside the main building, students from outside classrooms don’t have a place to dry wet mittens or enough hooks to hang up winter coats while they eat lunch. On Friday, some jackets were piled on a bench in the lobby between the office and the gym.

The overflow of coats wound up on the floor. One little fellow was worried when he couldn’t find his coat and asked for help.

There’s not enough room for all the children to eat their lunch in the cafeteria. Those in classrooms inside the kindergarten-through-second-grade school have to carry trays of food to classrooms to eat. The hot lunch food is prepared and trucked in at 10 a.m. from the middle school.

Kindergarten kids have snacks but aren’t in school for the hot lunch program. The school, which has shifts for Kindergarten, doesn’t have room for all kindergarten students to attend the entire day.

One kindergarten group arrives at 9 a.m. and re-boards buses at 11:30 a.m. The second shift arrives at 12:20 p.m. and leaves at 3:15.

The school is unquestionably cramped. Hager said there are more students in portables than in the main building. With 140 students, there’s only one bathroom for boys and one for girls, and those are in the main building. After returning to the school on a bus from a field trip, most of the children need to use a bathroom, but they usually have to wait because of the limited space.

Plumbing and portables

The school isn’t served by public water and depends on well water, which has also caused problems. “There’s been water pressure issues,” Evans said.

The quality of drinking water at White Rock School has been a problem in the past. Fountains at the school had to be shutoff for several months last year. Bottled water became necessary when the school’s well water failed to pass when the government changed water quality standards for arsenic. But a $25,000 filtering system rectified that dilemma.

“We’re up to par now,” Evans said of the school’s water quality.

The four portables, which each contain two classrooms, don’t have toilets or running water. The kids in portables have to cross the yard to the main building to use bathrooms. “The kids have to walk back and forth in the rain and the cold,” Evans said.

Some children have to sit in class with wet clothes. There isn’t room in portable classrooms to hang up coats and there’s no place to dry wet boots. “In the wintertime, it’s really bad,” said Barb Hauke, a second-grade teacher who has taught in portable classrooms there for 10 years.

In Hauke’s classroom, backpacks hang from chairs, which discomforts the kids. Coats sometimes fall from racks into fire lanes.

Second-grader Aidan Whitis tallied the width of his classroom, counting 18 tiles. Hauke has 17 students but in the past has had as many as 25 in her portable classroom. “That’s tight,” she said.

Evans said the portable classrooms don’t have any air quality problems, because they are equipped with air exchangers. But they do get hot in May, June and September.

“It’s cold in the winter,” said Jackie Miner, a second-grader in a portable classroom.

Diana Clark is a reading educational technician for first and second grades in the portables. “It’s cramped. We make it work,” she said.

Getting creative

In the main building, Evans and teachers also have to maximize available space. Hager said Evans, teachers and staff have “worked head over heels” to make things work at White Rock School.

The office once used by a former teacher-principal has been converted into a speech therapy room. Evans’ present office doubles as a conference room.

The school nurse position is part-time and that area is small. “We don’t have the clinic space other schools have,” Evans said.

But Evans said the classrooms in the main building have sinks and are bigger than newer classrooms in the Narragansett School on Main Street near the Municipal Center. All classrooms in the main building and the portables at White Rock are equipped with computers.

There are no coatrooms in the school. Backpacks line benches and coats hang along a central corridor in the main building. “We make do,” Evans said.

Because of the small size and low ceiling in the area called a gym, Kathy Stager, who teaches physical education, can only handle half a class at one time. And there’s no place to store balls and other equipment. Lunch tables fold up against a wall during gym classes.

“It would be nice to have a gymnasium,” she said.

When the weather permits, Stager takes her classes outside. The school has a playground.

Vicky Harvey, who has a child in kindergarten at White Rock, has volunteered there as a parent since her two older children were students there. She praised the teachers at White Rock for their creativity.

“The teachers have made the best of the space,” Harvey said.

Harvey, who serves on the school’s advisory team, said as a parent she loves the school, but she said a nicer building is long overdue. “A nicer facility makes students and teachers feel more valued,” Harvey said.

Shape of project unclear

Evans said many parents favored a school that would house kindergarten through fifth-graders. It could include an all-day kindergarten. The Kindergarten moved to White Rock, which previously had grades one through three, when grades in Gorham schools were reconfigured in October of 2003 when the new middle school opened.

The Narragansett Elementary School also has kindergarten through second grades. The Village Elementary School on Robie Street has grades three, four and five.

Evans said options to eliminate crowded conditions would include a “retrofit” of the existing building, a new building at the same site or a new building at a different place. No site has been chosen. Superintendent Ted Sharp said a school project would either be at White Rock or in the Little Falls area.

Gorham Town Manager David Cole said the White Rock site was small. The school sits on a 12-acre site with a well and the school has its own septic system. “Having sewer capacity in Little Falls opens it up as an option,” Cole said.

Hager said relocating a school on another site would be emotional for many people. “It would make sense to take a strong look at where services are,” Hager said.

As a process to build unfolds, Roger Marchand, a member of the School Committee, advocated keeping the townspeople well informed. “I want to make sure we over communicate with the public,” Marchand said.

Before next week’s School Committee meeting, the possibility of a new school will likely be a topic when Sharp and school committee members meet with Evans, teachers and parents at 3:30 p.m. in their monthly “Partners in Education” meeting.

The Gorham School Department hopes that the state would pay for a new school to eliminate years of overcrowding at White Rock. “Our application was to build a K-5 building,” Paul Kelly, business manager for Gorham schools, said last week.

A new building could be 75,000-square feet and for 450 students. A similar project, East End Elementary School in Portland for 350 students, is under construction now and is expected to open in September. Its price tag is $10.5 million, according to Richard Paulson, director of finance and operations for Portland Schools.

A state spokesman said they would likely begin meeting with Gorham in January or February. But right now, a White Rock project has not been determined. Scott Brown, school construction specialist for the state’s Department of Education, said the state is now working with numbers one through seven on their priority list.

“We don’t have a project yet,” Brown said last week about White Rock.

To get to lunch at White Rock School in Gorham, students from portable classrooms crawl through an outside gate before filing into the main building where they eat.

With a shortage of hooks, some of their coats were left piled in a heap in the school’s lobby. And there’s not enough room for all students to eat lunch in the cafeteria, which doubles as a gym, so many students have to take their lunch back to class.

“We were told it’s the most crowded school by square footage in the state,” said Margaret Evans, principal of White Rock School.

The White Rock School is No. 10 on a state list of schools most in need of improvement. The Gorham School Committee will discuss appointing a project committee, the first step to solving the overcrowding, when it meets at 7 p.m. on Wednesday, Dec. 14, in the high school auditorium. A project committee would be a forerunner for a building committee.

School Committee Chairman Jim Hager is optimistic that help is on the way. But just what shape that help would come in is unclear now.

“The state will determine whether we renovate or build new,” Hager said.

A cramped history

Overcrowding at the White Rock School is not new. There have been portable classrooms there for 18 years.

White Rock School was built in 1962 as a kindergarten-through-eighth-grade school with a capacity for 87 students. Enrollment swelled to 160 students two years ago. It has dropped to 140 students since then. Classroom space has never been added to the main building, Evans said.

To reach the cafeteria, children in classrooms housed in portable buildings, which sit on posts, have to go outside and crawl through a schoolyard gate.

“They’re good at it,” said Patty LaRosa, a second-grade teacher.

The gate went up a couple of years ago as a roadblock to stop motorists from cutting between the school and the portables, as a shortcut between adjacent roads.

Once inside the main building, students from outside classrooms don’t have a place to dry wet mittens or enough hooks to hang up winter coats while they eat lunch. On Friday, some jackets were piled on a bench in the lobby between the office and the gym.

The overflow of coats wound up on the floor. One little fellow was worried when he couldn’t find his coat and asked for help.

There’s not enough room for all the children to eat their lunch in the cafeteria. Those in classrooms inside the kindergarten-through-second-grade school have to carry trays of food to classrooms to eat. The hot lunch food is prepared and trucked in at 10 a.m. from the middle school.

Kindergarten kids have snacks but aren’t in school for the hot lunch program. The school, which has shifts for Kindergarten, doesn’t have room for all kindergarten students to attend the entire day.

One kindergarten group arrives at 9 a.m. and re-boards buses at 11:30 a.m. The second shift arrives at 12:20 p.m. and leaves at 3:15.

The school is unquestionably cramped. Hager said there are more students in portables than in the main building. With 140 students, there’s only one bathroom for boys and one for girls, and those are in the main building. After returning to the school on a bus from a field trip, most of the children need to use a bathroom, but they usually have to wait because of the limited space.

Plumbing and portables

The school isn’t served by public water and depends on well water, which has also caused problems. “There’s been water pressure issues,” Evans said.

The quality of drinking water at White Rock School has been a problem in the past. Fountains at the school had to be shutoff for several months last year. Bottled water became necessary when the school’s well water failed to pass when the government changed water quality standards for arsenic. But a $25,000 filtering system rectified that dilemma.

“We’re up to par now,” Evans said of the school’s water quality.

The four portables, which each contain two classrooms, don’t have toilets or running water. The kids in portables have to cross the yard to the main building to use bathrooms. “The kids have to walk back and forth in the rain and the cold,” Evans said.

Some children have to sit in class with wet clothes. There isn’t room in portable classrooms to hang up coats and there’s no place to dry wet boots. “In the wintertime, it’s really bad,” said Barb Hauke, a second-grade teacher who has taught in portable classrooms there for 10 years.

In Hauke’s classroom, backpacks hang from chairs, which discomforts the kids. Coats sometimes fall from racks into fire lanes.

Second-grader Aidan Whitis tallied the width of his classroom, counting 18 tiles. Hauke has 17 students but in the past has had as many as 25 in her portable classroom. “That’s tight,” she said.

Evans said the portable classrooms don’t have any air quality problems, because they are equipped with air exchangers. But they do get hot in May, June and September.

“It’s cold in the winter,” said Jackie Miner, a second-grader in a portable classroom.

Diana Clark is a reading educational technician for first and second grades in the portables. “It’s cramped. We make it work,” she said.

Getting creative

In the main building, Evans and teachers also have to maximize available space. Hager said Evans, teachers and staff have “worked head over heels” to make things work at White Rock School.

The office once used by a former teacher-principal has been converted into a speech therapy room. Evans’ present office doubles as a conference room.

The school nurse position is part-time and that area is small. “We don’t have the clinic space other schools have,” Evans said.

But Evans said the classrooms in the main building have sinks and are bigger than newer classrooms in the Narragansett School on Main Street near the Municipal Center. All classrooms in the main building and the portables at White Rock are equipped with computers.

There are no coatrooms in the school. Backpacks line benches and coats hang along a central corridor in the main building. “We make do,” Evans said.

Because of the small size and low ceiling in the area called a gym, Kathy Stager, who teaches physical education, can only handle half a class at one time. And there’s no place to store balls and other equipment. Lunch tables fold up against a wall during gym classes.

“It would be nice to have a gymnasium,” she said.

When the weather permits, Stager takes her classes outside. The school has a playground.

Vicky Harvey, who has a child in kindergarten at White Rock, has volunteered there as a parent since her two older children were students there. She praised the teachers at White Rock for their creativity.

“The teachers have made the best of the space,” Harvey said.

Harvey, who serves on the school’s advisory team, said as a parent she loves the school, but she said a nicer building is long overdue. “A nicer facility makes students and teachers feel more valued,” Harvey said.

Shape of project unclear

Evans said many parents favored a school that would house kindergarten through fifth-graders. It could include an all-day kindergarten. The Kindergarten moved to White Rock, which previously had grades one through three, when grades in Gorham schools were reconfigured in October of 2003 when the new middle school opened.

The Narragansett Elementary School also has kindergarten through second grades. The Village Elementary School on Robie Street has grades three, four and five.

Evans said options to eliminate crowded conditions would include a “retrofit” of the existing building, a new building at the same site or a new building at a different place. No site has been chosen. Superintendent Ted Sharp said a school project would either be at White Rock or in the Little Falls area.

Gorham Town Manager David Cole said the White Rock site was small. The school sits on a 12-acre site with a well and the school has its own septic system. “Having sewer capacity in Little Falls opens it up as an option,” Cole said.

Hager said relocating a school on another site would be emotional for many people. “It would make sense to take a strong look at where services are,” Hager said.

As a process to build unfolds, Roger Marchand, a member of the School Committee, advocated keeping the townspeople well informed. “I want to make sure we over communicate with the public,” Marchand said.

Before next week’s School Committee meeting, the possibility of a new school will likely be a topic when Sharp and school committee members meet with Evans, teachers and parents at 3:30 p.m. in their monthly “Partners in Education” meeting.

The Gorham School Department hopes that the state would pay for a new school to eliminate years of overcrowding at White Rock. “Our application was to build a K-5 building,” Paul Kelly, business manager for Gorham schools, said last week.

A new building could be 75,000-square feet and for 450 students. A similar project, East End Elementary School in Portland for 350 students, is under construction now and is expected to open in September. Its price tag is $10.5 million, according to Richard Paulson, director of finance and operations for Portland Schools.

A state spokesman said they would likely begin meeting with Gorham in January or February. But right now, a White Rock project has not been determined. Scott Brown, school construction specialist for the state’s Department of Education, said the state is now working with numbers one through seven on their priority list.

“We don’t have a project yet,” Brown said last week about White Rock.