The Boothbay-Boothbay Harbor Community School District Committee and Board of Trustees picked Lavallee Brensinger Architects (LBPA) over five other candidates June 23 for the CSD campus development project. The firm worked on the district’s campus master plan, delivered in January.

CSD Committee Vice Chair Peggy Splaine said “hire” might not be the right term since the district did not yet have the approximately $2.5 million businessman and philanthropist Paul Coulombe pledged at the plan’s delivery. “I just want to clarify … because we don't have any financial pieces and we don't have any money in the bank … how can we be hiring someone without money to pay them,” Splaine asked.

Committee member Bruce MacDonald said the lack of funds was beside the point, since LBPA's selection by the subcommittee lacked the transparency for his and perhaps others' buy-in. “I'm troubled by the word 'hire' in this motion … We have no money in the bank, we have one possible choice apparently (and) I also think through this process, with all due respect to all of us, I have never heard clear connection between why we think we're going to get better education out of spending 40, 50, 60, 70, $80 million or whatever it comes out to be.”

Trustee and building committee member Kevin Anthony explained the rating system used to narrow down the six candidates' qualifications fairly. Boothbay Harbor Selectman Tricia Warren, a nonvoting member of the building committee, also vouched for the process. “When it came ... down to the two, of the presentations brought before us, (Lavallee Brensinger) was a better choice. Again, this is coming from me who had no working knowledge of their involvement prior to (this).”

Considering the lack of funds, both bodies approved Trustee Troy Lewis’s amendment replacing the word “hire” with “select” in the motion on the floor.

Alternative Organizational Structure (AOS) 98 Superintendent Keith Laser said the contract will not be signed until the funds are in hand. Then the committee and trustees will jointly select a building committee to continue the project until it is shovel ready.

In a phone interview following the meeting, AOS 98 Executive Assistant Evelyn Andrews confirmed the amendment had been approved, but the resulting new language was not acted upon. Andrews also reaffirmed LBPA's hiring will occur in a future meeting once the CSD has the funds.

LBPA’s Lance Whitehead, Anne Ketterer and Joe Britton III presented what to expect in the design. They stressed a focus on the schools’ local resources and connections and sense of community. From place-based education and service learning to internships, community connections, mentorship and more, the building’s design will work for those needs and more, they said.

Said Ketterer, “We believe that a school is a community building, so it is critical the community have a voice in what its school becomes … where students want to learn, where parents want to send their children, to make it a destination for not just this region, but the greater region.”

Whitehead explained why just fixing the campus is not the way to go: Most of the systems in Boothbay Region High School are at end of life; replacement  allows overhaul of a building and molding it to better serve its population. Said Whitehead, “Even if you said ‘I don't want to change anything … (and) we can put $8 million in it just to fix it,’ the bigger problem with the high school isn't just that it's an older building, it's set up for older education. It's set up for reading, writing and arithmetic, teacher-focused classrooms, something that, at the time it was built, was absolutely appropriate. Environments we see today (are) really flexible space with sightlines so kids can work in groups independent of a teacher, but still supervised … It wouldn't be cost effective … mostly because it's made of narrow spaces, has a lot of loadbearing walls and has some structural issues we'd have to, by the time it's renovated, spend more money than if you just took the building down and built the addition.”

LBPA projected that an accelerated schedule would put shovels in the ground as soon as next May, with completion in summer 2024.