WINDHAM – The Windham-Raymond RSU 14 School Board voted Wednesday night to keep Jordan Small Middle School open, rejecting a cost-saving proposal that upset many Raymond residents.

While the final vote was overwhelmingly against the school closing proposal, with Mike Duffy of Windham the lone ‘yes’ vote, the difference in closing the beloved middle school and keeping it open hinged on the same basic mathematics taught in grade school: too many students and too few classrooms.

Board Chairman Toby Pennels, who had favored the idling proposal until recent weeks, surprised many in the audience by signifying his intention to vote against the proposal, citing the cramped space that would result if Jordan Small was closed and all K-8 Raymond students had to be “shoe-horned,” as he described it after the meeting, into what is now Raymond Elementary School.

However, Pennels qualified his remarks by saying he would have supported the proposal if there were 30 or 40 fewer students, and that the board will revisit the issue if school population figures change in the future.

“I went over and actually looked at the building,” Pennels said after the meeting. “I actually saw the classrooms. I had made an assumption, which is probably subliminal more than anything else, but the second floor is not a mirror match in classrooms. It’s missing four classrooms upstairs. For whatever reason, I hadn’t seen that before.

“And then I started counting numbers of students. And there’s no room for margin of error,” he continued. “If it was just a little less population or a few more classrooms we could have done it. And that’s what drove it for me.”

The proposal was originally made in October by the Short-Term Facilities Update Committee, a panel of Windham and Raymond residents and School Board members tasked with finding cost savings in the buildings and maintenance line of the school budget.

Raymond Elementary School and Jordan Small are both operating at half-capacity, so the idling of Jordan Small would have required all middle school students to attend Raymond Elementary, which would have become a K-8 school. According to estimates, the closing would have saved the district an estimated $230,000 a year, with $400,000 or more being required as a one-time cost to retrofit the Raymond Elementary School.

Parents, Jordan Small staff members and residents spoke passionately against the idling proposal Wednesday night, just as they had at two previous public hearing on the issue held in November.

Some used facts and figures warning school board members to reject the proposal. Some chastised members for not doing more research and not knowing exactly the costs of the closure and subsequent renovations to Raymond Elementary School. Others offered alternatives for saving taxpayer money and making better use of the two Raymond schools, which are both at half-capacity while all Windham schools are at or over capacity.

While Raymond will be able to keep its school, the effects of the past month’s process will probably be long remembered. At all three public meetings, offended Raymond residents accused Windham officials of driving a rift between the communities with the proposal. At the first meeting, Raymond parent Robert Murray even called for Raymond’s secession from the RSU, saying the town was being bullied by larger Windham, whose six members on the board can, if they wish, overwhelm Raymond’s three members.

Had the vote resulted in Jordan Small’s closure Wednesday night, the rift would have likely become larger. But with the proposal’s failure, talk after the meeting was about reconciliation and moving forward together.

“I think good conversations came from this,” longtime Raymond board member Jeri Keane said after the meeting. “Generally, Raymond residents have been very supportive of education. I think if we were closing Jordan Small, the rift would be tremendous. I think now we can move beyond that and work toward, as an RSU, finding solutions from both sides, from all the people in the RSU.”