A portion of a dilapidated school building in South Windham that has been used as a storage facility for the past several years will be demolished in the coming months, according to Bill Hansen, facilities director of Regional School Unit 14.

The 8,500-square-foot building on High Street most recently housed the Windham REAL School, an alternative education program for students with behavioral and learning difficulties in grades 6-8. But the building has been vacant since the school moved to Mackworth Island in Falmouth in 2008 in order to accommodate students from the Greater Portland area.

“It has been used as a storage building for school materials and furniture, since that time,” said Hansen.

The one-story structure, which is located at 55 High St. and posted with no-trespassing signs, was built in 1926. It replaced a two-story school that was built in 1887 but burned in a fire in 1925, said Kay Soldier, a Windham Historical Society member. The school is named after John Albion Andrew, who was born in Windham in a house on the corner of Depot and High streets in 1818 and served as governor of Massachusetts during the Civil War, Soldier said.

“His father was a grocer in South Windham,” she said.

Hansen said the 1926 building has been deemed structurally unsound and no longer serves the needs of the school district.

“The building is just not really a building that would meet today’s education needs of kids,” said Hansen.

“It’s outdated,” Sandy Prince, superintendent of RSU 14, told the Lakes Region Weekly. “It’s not handicapped accessible, and bathrooms are down in the cellar.”

“It’s an old building,” Prince said. “It needed repairs. We’ve maintained it, but we certainly have not maintained it to the level where we can put students back into that building.”

The school district sent out a request for proposals for the demolition work on Oct. 30, and a meeting was held Nov. 5 with contractors to discuss razing the old building. Hansen said bids for the project are due back to the town by 2 p.m. Friday.

Hansen said he could not provide a cost estimate for the demolition work until he opens the bids Friday afternoon.

“We are going to take the information to the school board on Nov. 18,” Hansen said. “The plan is to demolish the building before the end of the year.”

The school district does not plan to replace the building with a new structure, he said, but it may retain a 4,500-square-foot portion that was constructed in the 1950s, or later, for storage needs.

The other portion that is slated for demolition can’t continue to be used for storage because of its poor condition, Hansen said. He said wooden structures like the John Andrew School typically have a 50-year life span.

“We’re beyond that 50 years,” he said.

According to Hansen, the school board is expected to choose a contractor and will decide how to move forward with the work next week. District officials have been discussing whether to demolish the school since the beginning of the 2015-2016 fiscal year, he said.

“It’s just not a building that’s worth keeping up,” Prince said. “I think it’s a good plan, and I am pleased to think we can still have some storage space over there, because storage is always a challenge for us.”

Hansen contacted Linda Griffin, president of the Windham Historical Society, to see whether the society would be interested in taking photos and salvaging some items from the building that have historical value, he said.

Hansen said, despite the building’s history, “no one is opposed to the idea of tearing it down.”

Hansen has assured Griffin that the school district would give her and the other historical society members time to document and salvage some old items, like moldings and hardware, that would be “unique to the period of that building.”

According to Griffin, the historical society plans to record the John Andrew School by drawing the floor plan and taking photos of the interior and exterior of the building. It will also retrieve such items as the building’s sign, old doors, chalkboards and desks, Griffin said, to reuse in some of the town’s historic buildings that will be relocated to a Village Green History Center, which is being created behind the society headquarters on Windham Center Road.

“I have a lot of memories about that school,” said Soldier, who attended the school in the 1940s. “We used to play in the field out back. We used to dig dandelion greens and pick raspberries.”

The Village Green History Center currently features an old one-room South Windham Public Library that was relocated from its previous location beside the Presumpscot River in the Little Falls section of Gorham. It closed in August 2012.

The old library is one of several historic town structures purchased by the historical society and moved to the history center in order to be preserved and used for educational purposes. The building will eventually be converted to a museum devoted to South Windham Village memorabilia, according to the Windham Historical Society website.

The John Andrew School was first built in 1887 and then rebuilt in the 1920s.