When the town of Brooks first envisioned the brick school near its crossroads in the 1930s, it was designed to hold up to 350 students. By the time the town voted to close the school last year, enrollment had dropped below 100. 

When the school was built, the Waldo County town was a prosperous farming community, with seven pants manufacturers, according to a book from the time. Today, Brooks is primarily a bedroom community of Belfast, bisected by two state roads.

On March 21, town voters will make another decision about the former Morse Memorial Elementary School: Should the town absorb ownership of the building, and its associated costs, from the school district? If so, what should the building be used for next?

“It can either be an asset or a detriment,” said Ray Quimby, a lifelong Brooks resident who graduated from the school and now sits on the town’s planning board, “and my preference is to make it an asset.”

One possibility would be to convert the building into apartments, a proposal that fits into a larger plan the Maine Legislature is currently evaluating. Lawmakers are debating whether to create a $5 million fund that could be used to help towns turn vacant school buildings into housing.

The Maine Redevelopment Land Bank Authority, which works with towns to help revitalize old buildings, has so far identified 27 former schools across the state that could fit the bill, including the one in Brooks. They find out about new ones through news reports or outreach efforts.

Schools have certain advantages that make them promising for housing developers, such as being connected to sewer systems and close to community resources. Towns usually want to see them have a second life, as residents often have an emotional connection to the space, said Tuck O’Brien, executive director of Maine Redevelopment. 

But the age of many of Maine’s closed schools means they can also come with pricey renovation problems or lack the square footage attractive to developers facing high construction and labor costs. And towns may have other ideas for the buildings, such as converting them into community centers or mixed-use spaces.

Putting buildings back to work

The land bank was created by the Legislature in 2022 to help local governments put defunct buildings back to work. There is enthusiasm for the project, but O’Brien said it can be more challenging than one might imagine to determine which sites could work, as has been the case for former schools.

The Maine Department of Education maintains a list of closed schools, but the data only goes back about a decade, and it is not always clear whether the closure has left behind an empty building or if a new school has filled the space.

The viability of these buildings varies. Some are in locations where housing is a hot commodity and will be scooped up quickly by the private sector, O’Brien said. Others need to be torn down due to poor conditions. The ones in the middle are the most difficult, either because they have structural problems such as poor insulation or do not score well on traditional tax credit programs geared toward rehabilitation.

Affordable housing is at a premium in Maine, but O’Brien said the land bank’s ultimate goal is to get properties back to work, not just to create housing. Any kind of reuse of a building can lead to better economic revival for a community, he said.

“Housing is some of the hardest stuff to do,” O’Brien said. “But nothing else works in a community without housing.”

The bill before the Legislature, L.D. 2164, would facilitate this progress by providing technical and financial assistance to any town or city that chooses to convert a vacant school building into housing.

It would cover work such as environmental assessments, comprehensive plan development, environmental clean-up and identifying financing possibilities. It would not finance projects for buildings owned by school districts or already sold to developers, but the land bank could work with those entities if a town wanted it to on its behalf. 

Some lawmakers question how much help these projects should get. Rep. Amanda Collamore, R-Pittsfield, asked O’Brien during a legislative Committee on Housing and Economic Development work session on March 3 if there was a way to prevent people from accessing the money if they had already gotten assistance from state affordable housing programs. She said such “double dipping” has been an issue with economic development programs in the past.

“How do we avoid that from happening, because we’ve had a lot of programs fail in this committee for economic development because of that,” she asked O’Brien, who was answering lawmakers’ questions during the session.

O’Brien said the fund would be for projects unable to get off the ground without additional money.

“This is for projects like we see in Union, like we see in New Sweden, like we see in Van Buren, where the pie chart just doesn’t get full no matter what you do,” he said.

Collamore and two other Republicans at the committee hearing ultimately voted against the bill, which passed, 8-3. Collamore said it would be unfair for her constituents — where three elementary schools may close under a consolidation plan — to fund other municipalities’ projects “when they already pay for so much.”

If the bill makes it through both chambers, it will still need to be funded by the Legislature’s appropriations committee. 

Pressures on school closures and conversions

The biggest reasons why schools close are declining enrollment and financial challenges, said Mara Tieken, a professor at Bates College who has studied how the closures of rural schools affect their communities. In Maine, both are an issue.

The Maine education department shows enrollment in schools has dropped 6.6 percent over a decade. This year, the Governor’s Commission on School Construction reported 497 school buildings needed either major structural overhaul or new construction, costly improvements such as energy systems and code updates, or light upgrades. The total cost to make these changes would be more than $11 billion.

Districts with smaller student bodies probably have less of a tax base to fund improvements, Tieken said. As enrollments drop, the state gives districts less money under its cost-per-pupil formula. And Maine’s population is the oldest in the nation.

“There are less young families, less young children,” she said.

Eric Chinberg, a New Hampshire-based developer who has converted historic buildings such as mills into housing and office space, said the calculus for taking on a school can be tricky. Whereas mills lend themselves to housing conversion well because they are often centrally located, close to rivers, have high ceilings and big windows and have enough space to add elevators, schools can be a mixed bag in terms of architecture and size.

Projects often hinge on using a mix of private funding and state and local tax credits. Chinberg acquired and turned the Hilltop School in Somersworth, New Hampshire, into 22 apartments after leveraging several federal and state tax credits in 2020, a time when interest rates and construction costs were lower. Such a small project now, he said, might not be feasible for many developers.

“We’re passing on school opportunities because we can’t make the numbers work,” he said. “It costs more to renovate a nice-looking school than to build a new building.” 

Still, Chinberg said communities should approach projects with a creative mindset and said he thinks smaller towns could still see success. He decided to revamp a mill in Saco, for instance, because he assumed people in Portland and other more expensive cities nearby might be willing to commute.

“We were betting on people being priced out, and it worked,” he said.

What communities want

Some communities are at the start of figuring out what to do with their vacant schools; others have wrestled with them for decades.

In Brooks, the town pulled together a committee that looked at various options for the elementary school. An architectural assessment found the property would need minimal upgrades to become studio or office space, moderate changes to become some sort of community space or another school, and substantial changes to become a day care or residential space.

A demographic study found the town is short about 27 units of housing, and the need for day care is high. But a community forum and survey of 115 people found people were most interested in Morse becoming a community or recreation center, or a private or charter school — not housing. A little more than half said they wanted the town to keep the building.

Quimby, who sat on the school closure committee in addition to the planning board, said Brooks is looking to the future; it has a grant from the Maine Department of Transportation to do a downtown feasibility study. He personally thinks Morse could be a mix of housing, office space, recreation space and a commercial kitchen.

Brooks is in the early stages of determining what’s next for the empty school building. In Van Buren, town officials have been grappling with that question for more than 15 years. Town Manager Luke Dyer said the former Gateway Elementary School building is in good shape — “well pickled,” as he put it — because the heating system was replaced prior to its closure and has no smell, despite sitting vacant for years.

There has been interest in the property, but developers have backed out after having to track down the building’s original 1970 floor plans and sending engineers to assess it, Dyer said. 

“By the time you’re looking at funding stacks, developers have spent thousands of dollars and haven’t even put a new nail in the building,” he said.

Dyer is working with the land bank to find a new life for its school, Gateway Elementary, as are Brooks and several other towns, including Union. As a town on the border with Canada, “Van Buren’s main export is people,” Dyer said, and the community has a large elderly population.

But he does not want developers to count the town out; he believes the presence of two rocket companies in northern Maine will bring hundreds of workers who need a place to live. The town has its own electric utility. 

A dedicated state fund for rehabbing schools could help the town put together an assessment package that lays the groundwork for interested developers to look at the building without having to spend money on initial assessments, he said.

He thinks the school could be a success story like the former Hilltop Elementary School in Caribou, which was turned into senior housing after the town closed several of its schools.

Like Quimby, Dyer said he would like to see the school become a mixed-used property. He would like the town to retain access to the gym and cafeteria, while the rest gets converted into housing for people ages 50 and up.

“There’s a lot of focus on revitalizing multi-generation connections, where housing is being paired with community spaces,” Dyer said. “It creates better living for everyone.”

This story was originally published by The Maine Monitor, a nonprofit civic news organization. To get regular coverage from The Monitor, sign up for a free Monitor newsletter here.