CARIBOU, Maine — The COVID-19 pandemic has led to setbacks in the Caribou Community School project, but RSU 39 Superintendent Tim Doak said on April 23 that the facility is still set for completion on Sept. 10.
Several local contractors are working on the project, but more than a dozen workers from the southern part of the state — a region hit much harder by the virus — are no longer able to continue working in Aroostook because of the Gov. Janet Mills’ stay-at-home orders.
“We were a little nervous at first,” said Doak. “Some companies have stopped building in the southern part of the state. Right now we’ve been able to keep going.”
With everyone in the world practicing social distancing measures, Doak said contractors in the new school are following even stricter guidelines and have set up sanitizing areas and handwashing stations.
These guidelines have also affected suppliers. There are a few pieces of gym equipment that contractors may have trouble obtaining right away, but school officials are not viewing this as a major setback and Doak said it will not affect the completion date.
As the new school is being built, contractors plan to demolish the adjacent Caribou Middle School and use the area as additional parking space. The new pre-kindergarten through eight facility is being built to accommodate 750 students.
School officials were working before the virus hit to figure out a good timeframe in which all of the materials in the Caribou Middle School could be removed to make way for demolition this summer. Workers would have had a short window near the end of the school year to remove all the materials from the building if classes were still in session.
Now, with social distancing measures and stay-at-home ordersin place, there is much more time to clear out the building. Doak said this is a small silver lining in a time where the virus has had an overwhelmingly negative impact on everyone’s normal way of life.
He said the parking lot should be finished, along with the new school, in early September.
“We’ll be able to do the demolition a little earlier,” he said. “Abatement takes about two months, and we otherwise would have been tearing [down] the building in September, which would’ve been a real issue with space, and vehicles getting into the new school.”
It is currently unclear if the Maine Department of Education will recommend students continue remote learning into the 2020-21 school year, and the RSU 39 school board plans to discuss during its April29 meeting how best to adapt to possible future scenarios related to the pandemic.
