The Maine Board of Education’s recent denial of state funding to replace Edward Little High School should have driven a stake through the heart of the Auburn School Department’s ill-advised single-campus plan. But once bad ideas get onto the public agenda, they’re harder to kill than vampires.

The single-campus plan, green-lighted by the School Committee last December, envisions gradually scrapping the city’s neighborhood schools and housing all elementary, along with the middle and high schools, on the same site.

Under the plan, the present high school could not be renovated and expanded in situ, because that would leave insufficient room for additional buildings (the existing location containing only 21 of developed, and another 11 acres of developable, land, far short of the 100 required for a single campus). Instead, Edward Little would have to be rebuilt from the ground up at a new locale and at an additional cost of at least $12 million.

According to a 2009 study by the architectural firm, Harriman, the project price for a new high school on a new site would be about $61 million, while the cost of improving the existing structure and adding 66,000 square feet of space to address educational deficiencies (such as lack of an adequate cafeteria kitchen, performing arts space, and modern science labs) would run about $49 million.

Though conceding that there would be some disadvantages to renovating the present building — notably shortage of land for athletic fields and the challenge of reconstructing a school while it’s still in operation — Harriman concluded that “maintaining the existing site and upgrading an existing structure should be considered the more desirable option.” (Bear in mind that the proposed renovation would be an extensive one, not simply a band-aid).

Today the cost for an entirely new Edward Little could be substantially higher than Harriman’s 2009 estimate. The “15th Annual School Construction Report,” by School Planning & Management (February 2010), surveyed new high school construction costs for New England projects completed in 2010 and found they averaged $341 per square foot. That translates into a price tag of about $80 million for the 234,000 square-foot facility projected by Harriman.

Auburn’s request for state funding assistance was denied on Jan. 11, because 50-year-old Edward Little, rated 16 on the state’s roll of schools in critical need of improvement, was too far down the list to survive this year’s round of cuts. Six projects in other communities got the nod instead.

This means that every penny for the project will have to come from issuing municipal bonds, a form of borrowing that must be repaid with future local tax revenues.

Some may believe that spending an extra $12 million is worth it for a brand new structure. Those who think that way, however, should bear in mind a quote attributed to the late GOP Senate Minority Leader Everett Dirksen, “A billion here, a billion there, and pretty soon you’re talking real money.”

Or think of it another way: Saving $12 million could cover the cost of a new elementary school or finance the expansion of the middle school to accommodate all sixth graders.

In 2009, the Auburn School Committee chose to disregard Harriman’s recommendation to go the renovation route, opting instead to apply to the state for funds to a construct a new high school.

A year later, former Superintendent Tom Morrill told the School Committee he was “hopeful” that Auburn would receive construction money from the state to rebuild Edward Little High School. As of 2012, however, it has become evident that assistance from Augusta, if it ever arrives, is years away.

Nonetheless, Superintendent Katy Grondin reacted to the latest bad news with a “more of the same” attitude. “We’re sticking with our plan until we hear otherwise,” she said.

In other words, the School Department, like a punch-drunk fighter, intends to continue wading into the path of an inevitable knockout blow, waiting for state funding while allowing the single-campus idea to override the alternative of undertaking an immediate high school upgrade at a more affordable cost with local funds.

Aside from saving millions, retaining and improving the present building and site for Edward Little offers several advantages.

The first is location, location, location. It’s going to be difficult, if not impossible, to replicate such an accessible, centrally located site, not to mention one that blends so well with its surrounding neighborhood.

Second, time conserved by avoiding both the need for site acquisition/preparation and the bureaucratic red tape associated with state funding could considerably shorten the interval between design and the start of construction. As the U.S. emerges from the 2008 recession, the cost of building materials is expected to start climbing rapidly again. Thus, a multi-year delay could prove very costly.

Third, since a renovation/expansion would have to be staged over several years to avoid disrupting school operations, the time lag between commencement and completion might give the city an opportunity to reapply for state aid to assist with the later stages of the project.

The same statistics which make construction of a new high school relatively impractical make the single-campus plan hopelessly so. Data from the 15th Annual School Construction Report suggest that it would cost about $175 million at today’s prices to recreate Auburn’s existing 608,000 square feet of school floor space on a single campus.

To get some idea of the financial scale of such a plan, consider that the total valuation of assessed property in Auburn is about $1 billion and annual taxes bring in about $40 million. This means the cost of placing all Auburn schools on one campus would equal 17.5 percent of the city’s entire assessed property value and the cost to build the project would run almost 4-1/2 times the city’s current annual tax revenues.

Still, debate about the pros and cons of a single campus can be put off to another day, as long as Edward Little is unhitched from the single-campus plan today. The school’s life-safety and other facilities deficiencies caused it to be placed on probation by the New England Association of Schools & Colleges in 2009, after four years of having been put on warning status, indicating that decisive action is long overdue.

In short, the single-campus concept is distracting attention from, and causing unnecessary delays in, addressing the most critical challenge facing Auburn’s school facilities, the task of making Edward Little a suitable home for the Red Eddies.

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