The bulk of the Sept. 24 meeting of the Edgecomb Board of Selectmen continued an ongoing discussion on the future of the Edgecomb Eddy School and was attended by AOS 98 Superintendent Eileen King and several members of the school board.
Selectman Stuart Smith said the discussion over the school’s future began when an Edgecomb resident at the board’s Sept. 10 meeting questioned why Edgecomb even operated the school, citing concerns over the enrollment and costs.
“I didn’t say we wanted to close the school,” Smith said.
Comments about closing the school have put a lot of stress on the kids as well as their parents, King said.
King said that enrollment at the Eddy school fluctuates. “We’re kind of where we’ve always been,” she said.
King passed out copies of enrollment lists at the school over the last 29 years. Based on the data on that list, since the new school building opened in 2002, enrollment had a high of 107 students, and an average of about 88 students. The current school year as well as the 2002-2003, 2005-2006, 2006-2007 school years all share the lowest enrollment of 81 students.
Select Board chair Jessica Chubbuck said this was not the first time a citizen had brought concerns about the cost of education in Edgecomb, but closing the school was not an option she liked.
Edgecomb school board member Thomas Steele-Maley said he wasn’t sure bringing the seventh and eighth grades to the school is “the silver bullet.”
“We want what’s best for the school, and what’s best for the taxpayers of Edgecomb,” Steele-Maley said.
Eleanor Eide, of Edgecomb, said that “a school is one of the biggest parts of the soul of a town.”
Eide said that aside from the fire department, the school is the one thing that the far corners of the town have in common. Closing the school would “kill the community,” she said.
King said that the school board has developed two budgets for the school for the last two years. One budget was for an enrollment of grades K-6, and the second was for the costs of a K-7 enrollment.
King said she does not yet have accurate numbers of how many seventh and eighth grade students Edgecomb has. Those numbers will be important if there is to be a real conversation over the savings of changes, she said.
“I expect that the board will ask me to gather the information for them and it’s my goal to make this information available to them and the community in late fall,” she said.
Chubbuck said that more information is always better, and that “the town needs to make the decision” on what to do with the school.
Selectman Jack Sarmanian said the overall goal is to come up with “a common conscience between the school board, the selectmen, and the many people in the community” on how to provide quality education for their students, as well as how to pay for it.
