School project needs a timeout

To the editor

As Scarborough Superintendent Bruno reported in the recent installment of “School Stories,” the just-released school enrollment projection indicates the town will need to increase school capacity soon. This should have surprised no one, in view of the blank check given developers over the last five years. The piper must be paid.

The distressing assertion in the superintendent’s report is that the enrollment study somehow justified the need for a 1,000-plus student mega-school for kindergarten through third grade, as opposed to a solution that maintains the three existing neighborhood schools. The enrollment study reached no such conclusion.

Yes, more K-3 capacity is needed, but, no, the mega-school solution has not been proven to be the only or best solution. Whether the neighborhood schools should be abandoned is an open question for many residents.

And there are many other important questions that remain unanswered about the proposed school project, such as: Where would a new school be located? (That critical decision is now three months overdue.) Why is the early cost estimate of our proposed school $134,000 per student while that of a similarly sized school in Saco is $76,000 per student? Indeed, the town council has assembled a list of 74 questions about the school project. If those questions have been answered, the public has not yet seen them.

It’s time for the School Building Committee to acknowledge that a November referendum date is no longer realistic and that several serious concerns need to be resolved before the project goes any further.

Steve Hanly

Scarborough