The year was 1987, and Brunswick High School was in a sorry state. A year prior, the building on Spring Street had failed to meet the expectations of the New England Association of School and Colleges, driving the town into a municipal fervor. The debate: rehab or relocate.

It was the year that Steve Weems, now a Brunswick councilor, and his family moved to Brunswick.

“We were fairly new to Brunswick,” Weems said. “We had moved here because we had two sons … and the one that was going into sixth grade could walk right over there to the middle school, and the one going into ninth could walk right over to where the Harriet Beecher Stowe School is now, which was the high school,” both from their family’s house on Potter street. 

Arriving that same year was Dorothy “Dodie” Jones, who would quickly ascend to an important role in the burgeoning crisis.

“I had been a financial kind of person, so when I saw the school budget issues, I started getting involved, going to school board members and a couple of other people,” Jones said. “But we’d been dragging our feet, and the high school wasn’t going to get funding approved unless we… did something. This was like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to get funding from the state. And I’m like, we gotta do something about this!”

In 1990, Jones was elected to the school board at the same time Steve Weems was first elected to the Town Council, and went from attending citizen-led committee meetings to official school board meetings where she served as chairperson. Over her term, she would go on to field all manner of concerns from the public, from the high school negatively affecting the Maquoit Bay clam flats to being a veritable “Taj Mahal” in cost.

Others worried about abandoning the historic Spring Street school, instead wanting to retain and invest in the town’s landmarks. One of the most debated facts of the project was the cost.

“There was an estimate done on renovation and it was basically the same money as the new school (approximately $18.5 million),” Weems said. Supporters of the Spring Street site didn’t believe that the costs were that comparable, frustrating Dodie Jones and the school board. In lieu of a financial argument, proponents of Spring Street voiced concerns about walkability and sprawl.

Most of the supporters of moving the school to Maquoit Road were motivated principally by the available space.

“The total acreage at [Spring Street] site is about 10 acres, and it’s pretty well covered up now with a school and one playing field, that’s it,” Weems said. “It wasn’t big enough for soccer fields and baseball fields and tennis courts or anything else you’d want to have in a campus setting for a high school.”

Spring Street advocates feared that having the school in such a rural part of town, away from the heart of Brunswick, would rob athletics programs of their community and support from fans. 

Brunswick has a long history of shuffling high schools, beginning in 1915 when the original school burned. It was subsequently rebuilt on another site on Federal Street. That building later became Hawthorne Elementary School. By its second relocation in 1938, the high school landed at its former location on Spring Street where it would remain for 57 years. During this time, multiple additions were made, some of which garnered negative feedback.

“The original building was just old and uncared for,” Weems said. “The gym and the cafeteria, which were middle-aged, were good and the newer wing was a piece of junk; the floor sagged when you walked up and down.”

The state might have been prepared to fund a new school, but the town had to act fast. Given the divided opinions over where to put the school, the town decided to hold an advisory referendum, in which the entire town voted between the two sites. “A steamroller of a vote” declared the town in favor of Maquoit Road. Clifton Higgins sold the land to the town in 1993, and the town held a “binding referendum” to borrow the money to build the school. This question passed by a wide margin at the polls — but Town Council leadership pumped the brakes.

“To appropriate the bonds, and to fund the project, the Town Council chair had to sign the authorization document to issue the bonds,” Weems said. “The Town Council had five votes out of nine that it didn’t want the new school at Maquoit, and the Town Council chair, Reginald Pink, said, ‘I’m not signing the bondage, you can’t do it.’ And that was like checkmate, you couldn’t move forward, couldn’t do something else.”

More recent school relocations in Brunswick — Jordan Acre to Harriet Beecher Stowe and Coffin to Kate Furbish — have borne little resemblance to the drawn-out, nine-year high school effort. The key lesson from those simpler relocations, Weems said: “Build your schools in town!” 

With the high school relocation held up by the council, the town held a second binding referendum, yielding yet a third overwhelming majority in favor of a new school on Maquoit Road. So ” … gradually the council agreed” with public sentiment, and the council’s vote shifted from 5-4 against, to 6-3 for the new school.” Even so, “it was two or three years later than planned and just under the wire before we lost the school funding,” Weems said.

In the end, about 60% of the funding came from the state. At the time, it was the most expensive school ever built in the state of Maine, to the tune of $18.8 million.

“That was the No. 1 one issue and progress was glacial, but eventually justice prevailed, and the will of the town prevailed,” Weems said.

This article stems from a partnership between The Times Record and Brunswick High School students interested in pursuing journalism. The students are writing about issues related to their school and community.