BRUNSWICK — By September, school officials hope to have in place a long-term plan for configuring Brunswick’s elementary grades.

Among the possibilities are reopening Jordan Acres School and renovating Coffin School, both to serve kindergarten through second grade, and separate plans that could close Jordan Acres and expand Coffin School to provide K-5 instruction there and at Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School.

But those and other options remain to be hashed out, with cost estimates ranging from $8 million to $12 million.

Tonight, the School Board will hold a special meeting to discuss those facilities issues, in hopes of making progress on a facilities master plan outlining the district’s space needs.

The plans that emerge from the process would not affect the school district’s configuration for the coming academic year, but could have a lasting impact far into Brunswick’s future.

Currently, the district’s Jordan Acres School building is mothballed, and the newest school in the district is already stretched beyond its intended scope, with Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School serving just eight students less than its design capacity of 668.

In response to budget cuts in 2011 that prompted the mothballing of Jordan Acres, school officials opted to send all of Brunswick’s secondgraders to the Stowe school when it opened this year. The original plan for the new school called for it to serve all Brunswick third- through fifthgraders.

At a May 29 meeting, Superintendent

Paul Perzanoski said adding the second grade at Stowe put the district in an uncomfortable position.

“We haven’t been able to run that school as it was intended,” Perzanoski said. “It needs to be run efficiently with grades three through five.”

Rich Ellis, chairman of the district’s facilities and budget committees, recalled Wednesday that officials looked to that school as an asset for the district for the next 50 years. The decisions ahead will be on the same scale, Ellis said.

Key to those decisions are what to do with the mothballed Jordan Acres building, which was shut to cut costs. At a prior meeting, the board took formal action against reopening the school with its current open class- room format, in which separate classrooms have no dividing walls.

Already, the building has structural problems, including a roof that would need to be largely rebuilt, Ellis said. In total, to renovate the building and reconfigure the open classroom layout, the project is estimated to cost around $7.4 million.

Expansion of Coffin School would cost around $3.2 million, Ellis said.

Any combination of the projects would be funded through a bond that Perzanoski said he hopes would appear on the November ballot.

As for the timeline and the ultimate outcome, Perzanoski said he has no preferences.

“We can make work whatever is decided,” Perzanoski said.

Perzanoski did say that class size guidelines will be considered moving forward, with hopes of keeping grades K-2 below 18 students per class and grades 3-5 at or below 22 students per class.

Initially, town officials asked the school department to prepare figures for the district’s facilities needs by next Monday to allow the town to package a bond request for both school projects and a new police station planned for the corner of Stanwood and Pleasant streets.

Perzanoski said last week that the board would not need to have plans for the district facilities fully fleshed out before handing a bond figure to the Town Council, but School Board members still expressed concern about that timeline.

On Wednesday, Ellis said he’s pleased that the board seemed willing, after its most recent meeting, to continue discussions on school facilities before making any decisions.

“I’m glad that we’ve stepped back to talk about more options,” Ellis said.

At that meeting, Ellis added to the conversation the option of having two K-5 schools by expanding Coffin and reconfiguring grades at Harriet Beecher Stowe Elementary School.

In January, the firm Harriman Inc. presented to the board the results of a facilities study that laid out a total of eight configuration options and cost estimates for the district’s elementary grades.

The board will meet at 6 p.m. today in the town council chambers at Brunswick Station, 16 Station Ave.

dfishell@timesrecord.com

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