Like many of you I’ve been wrestling with this question. I will vote for building a new middle school and I thought I’d share with you how I came to my decision. I’m a 25-year resident with two children who began school at Rockport Elementary School and graduated from Camden Hills Regional High School more than 10 years ago, then unfortunately moved away (like many of our children).

You’ve likely read what’s been presented in support of new construction:

• New construction will cost more than maintaining the existing building, but over time (20 years) will make more fiscal sense. Probably true, but who can really predict the future.
• The existing building has been cobbled together over the years, both physically and mechanically, adjusting to the needs of our communities. Tough to argue with this one. The physical plant clearly needs a lot of work just to keep it going. Even if we fix or replace the mechanical systems (heating, etc) and repair what’s leaking, it seems to me the building will still be expensive to heat. It begs the question: Would repairing all these things (estimated at $16M) be money well spent? I think not, which is part of the reason I’m voting for new construction.
• The movement of students through the building is awful. From the moment kids are dropped off, to the time it takes for them to move between classes, to negotiating their shared time in the undersized cafeteria, the school is poorly laid out. While this can’t be denied, I’ve seen kids and educators overcome worse environmental challenges.
• Improving class spaces would improve the educational environment. Again, tough to argue with this, but can we afford it? Can we afford the extra cost of making our classrooms more suitable for our young people’s education? On the other hand, can we afford not to improve these spaces?

Improving the educational environment is what pushed me to a very clear yes, to vote for new school construction. I think we can all agree we have great, committed teachers, and we need to keep them. They work hard, and we need to keep them here, in our schools. Like for any business, any way we can help make our teachers more effective at their job, we should make that investment. A new school will do that, no question. Maintaining our old school does nothing towards this.

And one more intertwined consideration. Our community doesn’t have a lot of jobs, we have expensive real estate, and we have lots of seasonal home owners. We don’t have many levers we can pull to keep our community vibrant by attracting young families. Having top ranked schools is a lever we can control. They are one of the primary reasons young families want to live here.

Not every argument, pro or con, is compelling. But on balance, there’s no question we should be constructing a new middle school.

Geoffrey Scott lives in Camden