A school redistricting plan to ease overcrowding would require about 130 children from Windham to attend Raymond elementary and middle schools as soon as next year.

The proposal before the board of Regional School Unit 14 would have students who live north of Whites Bridge Road in Windham attend Raymond Elementary School and Jordan-Small Middle School.

Additional Photos

Windham Primary School teacher Julie Young shares a small office that used to be a supply and copy room on Tuesday, Oct. 2, 2012. Shawn Patrick Ouellette / Staff Photographer

Kim Perron, an occupational therapist at the school, occupies a space that was previously used for storage and once as a darkroom by the school's art classes. Shawn Patrick Ouellette / Staff Photographer

Some parents don’t like that proposal, saying they decided to live in Windham for a reason and don’t want their children to go to school in a different town.

“It’s like being told, ‘You’ve got to move now,’” said Nicole Heanssler, who has three children at Windham Primary School.

The first of two public forums on the proposal will be held Wednesday at Windham High School. The second will be held Oct. 10 at Raymond Elementary School. Both forums will begin at 6:30 p.m.

The school board may vote on the issue Oct. 17, said Superintendent Sandy Prince.

The board has been considering how best to use its facilities since Windham and Raymond schools merged into one district in 2008, said Catriona Sangster, a school board member and the chair of the committee that developed the redistricting proposal.

Sangster said Raymond Elementary School was built in 2000, after the town outgrew Jordan-Small, which had housed all students through eighth grade.

But Raymond’s population hasn’t grown at the rate projected at the time, and both schools are still half empty, she said.

At the same time, Windham Primary School, which serves kindergarten through third grade, is over capacity by about 130 students. Closets have been converted into offices, and a former computer lab is now a classroom, said Principal Kyle Rhoads.

The school’s enrollment is expected to grow by 20 children next year, which would require adding a modular building — at a cost of about $50,000, according to Prince. A renovation to bring the school under capacity would cost more than $6 million.

At Windham Middle School, which serves sixth through eighth grades, 180 students attend classes in a former elementary school building nearby.

Fourth- and fifth-graders from Windham attend the Manchester School, which is over capacity but not by as much as the others, said Sangster.

Another piece of the plan is to have fifth-graders attend Raymond Elementary, rather than Jordan-Small, to better align elementary and middle school curriculums throughout the district.

Since the Windham and Raymond school districts merged, the board has looked at moving all Raymond students through eighth grade into the elementary school and, later, at creating three schools for kindergarten through fifth grade, which would have required some students from Windham to go to school in Raymond.

The latest plan would not require major renovations or a reconfiguration of grades. Sangster said those are some of the reasons the board ultimately decided against the other proposals.

But Heanssler’s children have done well at Windham Primary School and she worries that they won’t get the same education at Raymond Elementary School.

Her neighbor, Shaun Morrison, said his family was considering moving to Cumberland, where he works, but decided to buy another house in Windham because of how much his son, Shamus, enjoyed kindergarten at Windham Primary School last year.

“If we had known about this, we would have given a second thought to where we moved,” Morrison said.

Sangster said she knows that change is hard, and she won’t be surprised if the proposal is amended to phase in the change so it doesn’t severely disrupt any students.

For example, she said, a fourth-grader at Manchester School could have to switch to Raymond Elementary next year and Jordan-Small the year after that. “That seems excessive,” she said.

But, Sangster said, she thinks this plan is the district’s best option for providing quality education while being fiscally responsible.

Staff Writer Leslie Bridgers can be contacted at 791-6364 or at:

lbridgers@pressherald.com

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