For the last time Monday, a new group of students filed through the halls of Wescott Junior High School for the first day of the school year.

In January, three grades of students, teachers and staff will move into the new, $34-million, 135,000-square-foot Westbrook Middle School on Stroudwater Street. The old building will be left mostly empty, pending the city solidifying its renovation plans, and no one from the school seems sad to be leaving it behind.

“This one is older than the hills. It’s falling apart.” said eighth-grader Ryan Lund.

Wescott Junior High was built in the early ’70s and was meant to house 400 students in the seventh and eighth grades. Later, the sixth grade joined the junior high, which comprises nearly 600 students.

Though Principal Brian Mazjanis said moving during the school year isn’t ideal, considering the disadvantages of the Wescott building and the amenities of the new school, he couldn’t justify putting it off until next fall.

“It would be foolish to have a state-of-the-art building and not be in it as soon as possible,” he said.

Mazjanis realizes there will be challenges. He said he’s trying to schedule some professional development days to give teachers time to move their materials and get used to the new classrooms and equipment before classes start in the new building, right after the school’s winter break.

“Any change is a little disruptive,” Mazjanis said. “There’s going to be some hard work.”

The students have a couple of concerns, too, like getting from one class to another in time in the larger, multi-level building. They said they’ll miss having a swimming pool right in their school.

But mostly, when they talk about the move, they talk about the gymnasium and the 1,000-seat auditorium. They talk about the bigger classrooms and the new baseball field. Even the eighth-graders, who’ve called the junior high home for the past two years, can’t get out soon enough.

“I wish I was a grade lower so I’d be able to spend a full year there,” said 13-year-old Najee White.

Construction on the new school is about 80 percent complete. Whiteboards are up in some of the classrooms and six basketball hoops hang from the ceiling in the gym. Extending from the cafeteria, most of the bricks have been laid for an outdoor patio where students will be able to sit and eat lunch.

“The building is such a better place for learning,” Mazjanis said.

One feature prevalent throughout the middle school is the amount of sunlight that filters in through the windows. Even in the late afternoon, most of the rooms are bright enough to read in without any lights on inside.

That’s far from the situation at Wescott Junior High, where many of the classrooms don’t have windows at all, or doors or even walls. Due to overcrowding, a lot of classes are held in sectioned off areas of larger open spaces with insufficient barriers between them.

Social studies teacher Liz Page, who’s worked in the junior high for 25 years, said it’s hard to teach in those spaces. She always has to keep her classes quiet so they don’t disturb the neighboring ones.

“It’ll be nice to be able to get up and move and do activities,” she said.

Though the building doesn’t function well as a school, Mayor Bruce Chuluda said it will still be useful to the city. Just what that use will be, however, has not yet been determined.

Earlier this year, Chuluda had asked the Wescott Junior High School Re-use Committee to come back to him in August with a definitive plan for the building after the students move. He said Monday he doesn’t expect that to happen for another few months.

“It’s been an extremely difficult process,” Chuluda said. “We’re not going to live up to the time frames, unfortunately.”

Discussions about plans for the building have included constructing an ice rink, moving the city and school’s administrative offices and housing some local nonprofit organizations. Chuluda said nothing that’s been talked about before has been taken off the table, but what can be done at the site will largely depend on outside funds the city can secure. Regardless, he expects the renovation plans to be voted on at a referendum, though he doesn’t see that happening in time for the November election, as he’d previously planned.

The re-use committee’s co-chairman, Jim Violette, said plans will remain at a standstill until the city conducts engineering studies to determine the amount of renovating that needs to be done and how much it will cost. He said he hopes the city will present some of that information at the committee’s next meeting to be held in the coming weeks.

Even if the grand plans aren’t in place, Chuluda said, he expects the city’s recreation department to relocate its offices from Foster Street to the old junior high in January, when the city takes over responsibility for the building from the school department. Areas that aren’t being used, he said, will likely be closed off for the time being in order to save on operating costs.

Still in question, too, is the severity of the deterioration of the 35-year-old John P. Davan Pool – the city’s only public indoor pool, which is located in the building. In May, Harriman Associates, the architectural and engineering firm that will design renovations for the junior high school, completed an inspection of the pool that concluded years of chlorinated water seeping through the concrete have, in some places, severely rusted the steel at its core.

Architect Dan Cecil requested permission from the city to have further studies completed as soon as possible by engineering firm S.W. Cole to test the strength of the concrete and the steel and see how advanced the deterioration is inside the pool’s walls.

“This will determine whether or not the pool structure can be repaired or must be replaced entirely,” Cecil wrote in an e-mail to city officials in May.

Chuluda said as of last week, the city still hadn’t received the results of those tests.

But according to the mayor, the city isn’t “in crisis mode” out of concern for the condition of the pool – or the structure in general.

“The building’s not ready to fall down around anybody,” Chuluda said. “It’s not in poor enough condition that we can’t utilize it to some degree.”

In Mazjanis’ mind, however, it’s not up to snuff as learning space for his malleable middle-schoolers and hasn’t been for a long time. After five years working in the junior high – and five years planning the move into the middle school – January can’t come soon enough for the principal, and he won’t be looking back.

“There’s no duct tape in the new school,” Mazjanis said pointing to the gray adhesive holding together the carpet in the junior high hallways. “I don’t know what we’re going to do without that.”

In their first week of the school year, eigth-graders sit outside Wescott Junior High School Tuesday. They’ll be moving into the new Westbrook Middle School in January. They are, clockwise from center, Brindi Ross, Madison Drew, Delaney Baither, Kyle Thibodeau, Ryan Lund, Najee White and Isaac Theriault. (Photo by Rich Obrey)