Sixty-one years is a long time. As a matter of fact, that’s just around the standard age for retirement. So what better time to retire the current Coffin Elementary School building?

Last week, after five years of debate, the Brunswick School Board finally recommended mothballing Coffin School. The defunct Jordan Acres School will finally come down and a new school will be built in its place.

The board also recommended a plan to repair the junior high.

Hopefully, this recommendation will soon come before the town council, and we say the council ought to support it.

Both Coffin and the Junior High have life safety issues. Many students at Coffin are also shuttled between mobile units that are nearly as old as the main building itself.

As tempting as it may be to throw more money at Coffin School in hopes of keeping it alive, past history suggests a different course may be more prudent. School board member Rich Ellis probably said it best: “As plans evolved in these most recent days, it became very clear to me that one of the solutions we were evaluating involved a tremendous number of mobile classrooms that Brunswick has had a pretty spotty history in managing appropriately.”

Educators work hard and their jobs don’t end when the bell rings at the end of the day. They deserve to teach in a facilities worthy of that dedication.

At the very least, they deserve to teach some place that’s safe.

Jordan Acres has been vacant for years and has become a tempting target for vandals. It’s also time for that building to come down.

This project won’t come cheap. The last estimated figure for the project was just under $30 million.

Residents may be understandably wary as to what a new school will mean for their tax bills, but they must trust in the officials whom they elected to choose a plan that spends the public’s hard earned dollars wisely.

The public does have a duty to ensure a safe and productive environment for Brunswick School children, and that’s only fair. Unless your family had the means to attend a private school, odds are good that your education, too, was subsidized by the previous generation.

Build a new Coffin School, repair the junior high.

It’s well past time.