RSU 40 Gets Creative To Update Aged, Failing Facilities

District officials and administrators described the maintenance and renovation projects well under way across RSU 40 this summer are emblematic of a districtwide recommitment to school maintenance and proactive investment.

“There are so many good things going on in our district, and I think we want the facilities to reflect that, or, at least, not take away from it,” Miller School Principal Julia Levensaler said the morning of Wednesday, Aug. 13.

While upgrades made this summer and in recent years to Miller School have helped Levensaler share the pride she feels for her elementary school, that positivity has not, historically, always prevailed, she said.

“Before Brian (Race, RSU 40 facilities director) got here, repairs were not necessarily done or not done in the right way, and I think for a lot of reasons, buildings were neglected,” she said. “It was embarrassing when people would come to Miller School when I first started.”

Miller School’s troubled facilities history is a story shared across RSU 40’s seven schools, where Race believes historically tight budgets pushed the district to defray important maintenance and building upgrades for decades.

By 2023, “we had some pretty serious issues that we needed to (address) to be able to even keep the schools open,” Race said.

That year, in hopes that the district might address the worst of those in one go, the RSU 40 Board of Directors proposed a bond of $80 million – the total cost the board said would be required to adequately address the district’s most pressing concerns, from overcrowding at Miller School to a failing roof at Union Elementary School and a failed septic system at Medomak Valley High School.

Taxpayers in the five towns within RSU 40 – Friendship, Waldoboro, Warren, Washington, and Union – rejected that proposal at the polls in November 2023. In the wake of that vote, Race said, the district was still facing the urgent need to fix their most pressing facilities issues.

In March 2024, the RSU 40 Facilities Committee recommended the district align with Energy Efficient Investments Inc., an energy savings company, to pursue renovation funding. The company has helped the district identify renovations that will improve its energy efficiency and tap into government grants available for such projects, Race said.

Another step forward was an additional $1 million added to the education budget at the RSU 40 budget meeting in 2024 at the suggestion of then-Union Elementary School Principal Scott White.

White said he wanted to see the funds go toward a septic system replacement at Medomak Valley High School, where both septic fields had failed.

At the recommendation of the facilities committee, the RSU 40 Board of Directors has now moved those funds into a “seed bed” for a loan to accomplish the septic system replacement and other pressing projects, according to Noah Botley, of Washington, the vice chair of the board and chair of the facilities committee.

The septic system replacement at Medomak Valley High School is under way. The project will see a new septic field placed between ball fields behind the school in what was previously unused space, a rarity on the space-limited campus, Race said.

Elsewhere in the district, other priority projects have been checked off or started in recent years. The Union Elementary School roof, which had failed to the point that staff members were placing buckets throughout the school during rain storms, was replaced last summer, and new heating valves and controls were being installed at Miller School this month.

The valves and controls will help regulate heating throughout the building, Race said. Levensaler said this upgrade would solve highly variable temperature among classrooms, where some kindergarten classrooms were virtually unusable at about 50 degrees in wintertime while other classrooms would concurrently reach temperatures in the 80s.

Other steps taken across the district are smaller but still impactful, Race said, from painting walls and siding to fixing parking lots and the intensive waxing of school floors undertaken by custodial staff every summer. At MVHS, a herculean effort to move all the school’s library materials allowed for a reorganization of furniture Race said he hoped would make the library a more inviting place for students.

The struggle to maintain schools while minimizing the education budget’s impact on taxpayers is a statewide problem, Race said.

“This is not just RSU 40,” he said.

He acknowledged that schools across the state are dealing with facilities challenges, a fact that has made it hard for RSU 40 to access state funds, such as through the revolving renovation fund, which is released in seven-year cycles.

During the most recent evaluation, of about 100 schools that applied for the fund, Miller School ranked 48th and Medomak Valley High School ranked 52nd, Race said. Neither placement was high enough to allow the schools to access renovation money from the state.

Nonetheless, district officials said they were determined to continue making upgrades to RSU 40’s schools. Incremental improvements, they said, may be the way those changes are realized.

“As a district, for students to take pride in their education where they are, the environment they’re in, is really important for them to feel good about what’s being invested in them,” Leah Shipps, a Waldoboro representative on the RSU 40 Board of Directors, said.