Lebanon Middle School, the last new public school built in the Upper Valley opened more than a decade ago, in 2012.
Lebanon voters approved the project in March 2010, just a couple of months before New Hampshire froze its state building aid program for schools. That meant that Lebanon taxpayers had to pay only 55% of the project’s total cost of $24.9 million, with the state picking up the rest.
The reason the bond issue passed, after three previous proposals failed to get the necessary 60% approval, was that state aid deadline, James Fenn, who was business administrator at Lebanon’s SAU 88 during the middle school project, said in an interview.
“They knew it was their last chance to do another building,” he said. “They wouldn’t have gotten that 45% state aid,” if they had voted it down again and waited.
Fenn is now business manager for the Mountain Views Supervisory Union, where voters will weigh in on March 3 on a proposal to build a new middle and high school in Woodstock that at 158,000 square feet would be roughly 50% larger than Lebanon Middle School. The Woodstock project is intended to house 600 students, with the possibility of further expansion to accommodate 750 to 1,000. Lebanon Middle School was built to house 500.
The point of urgency for Mountain Views is different. State aid, which has been frozen in Vermont for nearly two decades, is slated to resume and provide at least 20% of the funding. But every year the district waits, it runs the risk of incurring much higher costs.
This is a problem every construction project faces, but cost inflation has become dramatically worse in the past several years, Fenn said. Voters rejected an earlier version of the Woodstock project in 2024, and since then the project cost has swelled from just under $100 million to nearly $112 million. And that $112 million plan includes many cost trimming measures.
That urgency is easy to explain: Vote now, or pay a lot more later.
“That’s been our message all along: We can’t wait,” Mountain Views School Board Chairwoman Keri Bristow said in a phone interview.
Other school districts are operating with similar urgency, though there are few with major construction plans. Sharon Elementary School is starting work on a $7.1 million renovation and expansion approved a year ago, and in Cornish, residents will vote next month on an $11.4 million bond issue to fund renovation and a small expansion of Cornish Elementary School. Neither of those projects have the benefit of state construction aid.
What school officials have had to come to grips with in planning for these projects, and explaining them to the public, is that this is just what schools cost now.
‘Prices have gone a little crazy’
Sharon voters rejected a $9.5 million bond issue in May 2024. Without state aid, the price tag seemed too steep. School officials cut the project down by reducing the size of an addition from 8,220 square feet to 6,770 square feet, eliminating a new classroom, by not replacing the gym floor, and by using modular construction instead of framing built onsite.
The building came in at a construction cost of $615 a square foot, not including site work and building mechanical systems. Some of the work was deferred, such as the gym floor, updating the kitchen, adding a solar array and replacing windows. The project should achieve the main goals the district set for itself, without froufrou.
‘That’s what we’re trying to explain to people,” Will Davis, chairman of the Sharon School Board, said in a phone interview. “It’s not going to be fancy. It’s a public school.”
The deferrals are troubling though, and state assistance could have helped, he said.
“I think we would still want to be frugal and efficient, but I think we wouldn’t have wanted to defer some of those things,” Davis said. “Every time we defer it a year, it’s going to cost 3 to 5% more the next year.”
Sensitivity to the tax impact of school construction is not new. The Lebanon Middle School project went through three failed votes before it won approval in March 2010. But recent construction cost increases are far worse than in years past.
According to Bureau of Labor Statistics data, school construction costs began to climb steadily in 2017, leveled off briefly in 2020 and 2021, then turned sharply higher from the second half of 2021 until 2023, a time period that coincided with supply chain disruptions and massive federal investment during the coronavirus pandemic that contributed to widespread inflation.
While Lebanon Middle School cost around $240 to $250 per square foot to construct, the Woodstock plan carries a per-square-foot cost of $708. That cost increase is far above consumer inflation — $250 in 2012 is worth $352 today.
“It’s going up around 4 to 6% a year,” Fenn said. “Since COVID, prices have gone a little crazy.”
In particular, the cost of steel is up by 15%, thanks in part to tariffs, and anything requiring computer power, such as heating and cooling systems, costs significantly more, Fenn said.
In their appeals for voter support, Mountain Views officials have compiled a list of other school construction projects in New England with much higher price tags. Four recent projects in Massachusetts, a state with a strong state building aid program, cost between $953 and $1,031 per square foot.
And in Vermont, Burlington High School, currently under construction at a cost of $204 million, is priced at $816 per square foot, or more than $100 per square foot more than the Mountain Views plan.
Making a case for support
The construction cost is hard to get around, so Mountain Views officials are focusing on easing the tax impact of the proposed new middle and high school.
Voters in Mountain Views district’s seven towns — Barnard, Bridgewater, Killington, Pomfret, Plymouth, Reading and Woodstock — rejected a $99 million school construction plan in March 2024 by a vote of 1,910-1,570, a positive result that fell short of the 60% majority required to pass a bond.
While the estimated total cost of the new plan is nearly $13 million higher than the 2024 proposal, it would have been higher still without a $383,000 cut to the construction plan, which will have simpler rooflines and fewer windows, and a $550,000 cut for furniture, fixtures and equipment, which means more furniture will be reused in the new building.
The bond issue article conditions the project on two measures meant to safeguard taxpayers: The project won’t go forward if the district can’t raise at least 25% of the cost from federal, state and private sources, or if the state Legislature won’t do away with a 2024 measure that includes capital costs in the excess spending penalties under the state’s school finance system.
In dozens of meetings with the public, school officials have stressed that building the new school would be less expensive than renovating the existing one, mainly because the construction project is already approved for state aid. A new school would also be quicker to complete, could be done while students remain in the current building and would last longer, school officials said.
The cost is the main detail, though. State aid of 20% would amount to around $25 million, and there’s an effort underway in the seven-town district to raise private donations.
“We’re going to make a case to get as much support as we can,” Seth Webb, a member of the Mountain Views board from Woodstock, said of state aid. The state has discretion to provide up to 40% of a project’s costs, and could end up giving Mountain Views more than the 20% in the current proposal.
As the construction aid system, dormant since 2008, creaks back to life, it will take time for it to respond to the estimated $6 billion backlog of school renovation and construction across the state.
State officials “have yet to write the criteria for how you can move from 20 to 40” percent aid, Keri Bristow, chairwoman of the Mountain Views board, said this week.
Much else in state school funding is uncertain. Mountain Views is not releasing estimated property tax increases attributable to the bond repayment out of concern that the numbers would not be reliable.
Before the failed 2024 vote, donors pledged $3.5 million toward the project. That effort had to start anew, and Webb said he’s cautiously optimistic that private pledges will hit $3 million before the vote.
“We’re trying not to leave any stone unturned,” he said.
The Mountain Views project wouldn’t be the first public school project in the Upper Valley to rely on private donations. The $42.4 million renovation of Hanover High School and construction of Richmond Middle School, in the mid-2000s, benefited from a $9.7 million contribution from Dartmouth College and another $2 million from the Town of Hanover, in addition to state building aid, the Valley News reported at the time. Dartmouth also gave the Dresden Interstate School District a 5.4-acre parcel of land for the new middle school.
‘A backlog of renovations and repairs’
Schools are more often renovated and expanded rather than built anew in the Upper Valley. That’s been the case at Cornish Elementary School. The original building dates to 1953, but was renovated and expanded in 1970, 1988 and 1998, Alexys Wilbur, vice chair of the Cornish School Board, said in an interview.
The district started to assess its building needs in 2017, the same year it left the Claremont-based SAU 6 to form its own SAU.
“We knew going into it that there was a backlog of renovations and repairs,” Wilbur said.
A report last year laid out a plan to update and invest in the school and its maintenance.
Also since 2017, the school has experienced significant growth, from 78 students to its current enrollment of 133. Adding a pre-kindergarten program led to an influx of families, Wilbur, who’s been on the School Board for nine years, said. A report about the bond issue projects enrollment will reach 150 by 2030.
The $11.4 million bond proposal would replace the school’s aging roof and exterior, update electrical, plumbing and HVAC systems where necessary, remove asbestos and improve accessibility, essentially bringing the school up to modern standards. A 2,000-square-foot addition would provide a secure entrance and provide offices for district staff that have been in a modular building that was always meant as a short-term solution.
The proposal also would accommodate either a preK-8 school or a preK-5 school in the same footprint. Cornish is studying the formation of a cooperative middle school with neighboring Plainfield. In the preK-5 design, the school would be able to host another pre-kindergarten classroom, which would help meet demand for the program.
The first full year of bond repayment would raise the town’s property tax rate by $2.65 per $1,000 of assessed value. That would amount to $796 on a home assessed at $300,000.
The long deliberation over how to proceed has given way to a sense of urgency, Wilbur said. The proposal wraps as much work as possible into a single project, rather than spreading it out and incurring greater costs as inflation takes its toll.
“It’s less expensive to do it this way,” Wilbur said.