HARTLAND — A new proposal for the future of the town-owned North Hartland School will come before voters at Town Meeting this year.
Last year, voters defeated an article that would have authorized the Selectboard to sell the 1950s-era building located at 24 Mill St., which borders the Currier Park recreation area that includes a playground, baseball field and tennis and basketball courts.
Now, the Selectboard is trying a new approach and will ask voters next month to approve up to $50,000 from the Capital Reserve Fund to demolish the one-story, one-room structure. The $50,000 is already in the town’s Capital Reserve Fund and would not have an effect on the tax rate.
“There were a few very well spoken individuals who stood up and said once you sell something you can’t get it back and we shouldn’t give up any land we own as a town,” Phil Hobbie, chair of the Hartland Selectboard, said of last year’s discussion in a phone interview.
He thinks voters will be more receptive to demolishing the building, “because we’re coming with a realistic number to take the building down and to leave the parcel intact so that it can still be used as a park,” Hobbie said, adding that there are no plans for what would be put on the land if the school is demolished. The park and school are on a combined 1.25 acres of land.
The Selectboard voted 4-1 during its Jan. 20 meeting to put the article before voters. The lone no vote was Clyde Jenne.
“I was in favor of selling it so someone could make a starter home out of it,” Jenne said.
Jenne, who is president of the Hartland Historical Society, said the structure has “no great historical value.”
It was built in the 1950s amid the baby boom in the years after World War II, he said. After Hartland Elementary School was built in the early 1970s and took the place of the town’s smaller schools, the North Hartland building was no longer needed.
Over the years, it has been used as a child care center and educational facility for the Hartland School District, Jenne said. It has been vacant for at least five years.
The town currently spends an average of $81 a month to maintain the school. “As it stands now the heat is on to keep it so nothing breaks,” Hartland Town Manager John Broker-Campbell said.
The discussion about what to do with the North Hartland School dates back several years. In November 2023, the North Hartland School Committee formed to study the building and consider different options for its use.
It would cost at least $200,000 to fix it up, including a new electrical system, according to a November 2024 report from the committee.
“The cost to revitalize the school to address the many safety and other critical updates will be more expensive than to demolish,” Kimberly Gibbs, who chaired the committee, wrote in an email.
The proposal to demolish the building fits in with feedback from residents during last year’s Town Meeting when the proposal to sell the building failed.
“The community expressed that the property — with or without the building — be kept to support community events, town-wide yard sales (or the like), enhancement of the ball field so schools could use it for practice or games, gatherings, etc.,” Gibbs wrote in an email.
Community members were also worried that the land could be subdivided and what could become of the park if that were to happen.
Currier Park lacks shade and the committee suggested a pavilion be built for community events.
“The Committee was resolute to avoid subdivision,” Gibbs wrote in an email. “Keeping the building site and the fields together honors the history of the property and ensures that North Hartland retains a cohesive, permanent space for public gathering and recreation.”
If the article passes at Town Meeting, the town would put the project out to bid at the start of the July 1 fiscal year, with the goal of having the demolition completed before the end of the 2026 construction season.
Hartland’s Town Meeting is scheduled for Tuesday, March 3 at 9 a.m. in Damon Hall.