BRUNSWICK — School officials on Thursday endorsed a plan that would officially close Jordan Acres Elementary School while making approximately $21.5 million in renovations and additions elsewhere in the Brunswick school system.

Those plans still need refinement before the School Board can ask the Town Council to consider borrowing for the projects, but a School Board vote during a special meeting Thursday now provides an outline of how the board hopes to restructure Brunswick schools.

A number of steps remain to be taken before any shovels hit the soil, and at the earliest, any changes to Brunswick schools resulting from Thursday’s vote and subsequent planning would happen in the fall of 2013.

Thursday, by a margin of 6- 2, the School Board approved an outline of capital improvements that would include:

— Permanently closing Jordan Acres Elementary, which was mothballed last year.

— Moving the bus garage from the campus of Coffin Elementary and expanding the campus to include room to serve from pre-kindergarten to second grade.

— Renovating Brunswick Junior High School at an estimated cost of $10 million.

Those figures come from a facilities study commissioned by the School Board last fall, which prioritized and provided various options primarily for reconfiguring the school department’s elementarylevel system, which saw significant changes over the past three years.

After 116 years as an elementary school, Hawthorne School closed at the end of the 2008-09 academic year and was converted to administrative offices.

The school department closed Longfellow School, which was built in 1924, at the conclusion of the 2010-11 academic year.

Harriet Beecher Stowe School, originally built to educate all of the town’s third- through fifth-graders opened at the beginning of the current school year. School officials chose to send all of Brunswick’s secondgraders to the school after financial and structural problems led them to mothball Jordan Acres Elementary School in 2011.

To bring Jordan Acres back online, according to the district’s most recent facilities estimate, would cost around $2.6 million, including a full restructuring of the building’s roof.

That cost, however, was not all that drove some School Board members away from the option to reopen the school as they discussed their options on Thursday.

Board member Matt Corey voiced concern about the operating costs of keeping both Coffin and Jordan Acres schools open to serve the same school population.

Board member Rich Ellis expressed the same concern before Thursday’s vote, saying that keeping both schools open would add between $400,000 and $500,000 to the school system’s annual budget, on top of the money that would need to be borrowed to renovate the school.

State law requires that the school department notify the Maine Department of Education of the reasons for wishing to close the school and then the property could be turned over to the town.

Both Ellis and Corey were the dissenting voices in the 6-2 vote, with Corinne Perreault absent, to move ahead on the reconfiguration plan.

Elementary configuration

The outline approved Thursday aims to make room for a pre-kindergarten program at Coffin School, at an estimated cost of $1.4 million, and expand the school to include second grade students, who are currently at Harriet Beecher Stowe School, which was designed to hold only grades 3-5.

But within that general plan, some board members said Thursday that they would like to consider creating two schools that would each educate students from pre-kindergarten through fifth grade.

The board will now look to bring on an architect and construction manager to craft more specific cost estimates and project designs that the board plans to present for consideration as a bond measure.

Additional work

Along with the plans moved forward Thursday, the board voted to include other related capital projects in the planning process for a bond measure the board hopes to have ready by September, in time for a November ballot.

Those additional plans include an estimated $1.5 million for a bus garage — moving the current garage from the Coffin campus. Superintendent Paul Perzanoski said that the bus garage could potentially be located at the site of the former Times Record building, should that building ultimately be torn down by the town.

At a Town Council meeting in May, Town Manager Gary Brown said that, if the building is demolished, the empty lot could serve as parking for school department vehicles.

Earlier this year, Perzanoski suggested that the School Board step away from negotiations to acquire the former Times Record building for use as a bus garage, as the school department faced steep budget cuts and the renovation cost for that building was estimated to be more than $2 million.

Based on preliminary designs from the school department’s facilities director, Paul Caron, Perzanoski said that a bus garage at the site is estimated to cost around $1.5 million.

Along with elementary plans, the board approved adding renovation work to the junior high school as well, which had previously been placed into a later phase of the school department’s master plan for facilities.

The total estimates for those renovations come in at around $10 million. Board members

Michelle Small and William Thompson were the dissenting voices in the 6-2 vote, with Perreault absent, which brought the total estimate for the project outline to over $21 million.

Next step

With an estimated $21,501,560 in proposed capital projects, the School Board will now look to home in on more specific cost estimates for the projects outlined before submitting them to the Town Council for consideration as a bond measure.

“They will need to do some more planning now that they’ve identified their options to get to a more detailed concept so that can be priced with a little more certainty than they have now,” said John Eldridge, the town’s finance director, in a phone interview Friday. “Then we’ll have a better number for the development of a bond ordinance.”