Chris Howell, the superintendent of Windham, Maine's Regional School Unit 14 District (RSU 14) stepped through damp soil imprinted with tire treads from large construction equipment on a stretch of land near Sebago Lake.
In a few years, the site will be home to a nearly $156 million middle school.
Howell said the project is necessary because one of the district's two middle schools, a nearly 50-year-old building in Windham, has reached the end of its life and is no longer large enough to fit all its students. Classrooms are too small and do not meet the state standard for instruction, he added, and the 1977 air and construction standards used for the original build are no longer sufficient.
There also is little space for special education services like speech therapy, Howell told Maine Monitor.
"It also gave us an opportunity. Jordan-Small Middle School is a 1964 building and those students will be consolidating in as well," he said, referencing the district's facility in the nearby community of Raymond. "For the first time, we'll be able to offer equal programming to students in both Windham and Raymond."
The project, which broke ground in fall of 2024, is the most expensive state-funded school construction in Maine to date. The last school building effort to hold that title was Auburn's Edward Little High School, which opened in 2023 at an approximate cost of $122 million, according to state Department of Education (DOE) records.
RSU 14 is an above-average public school district with approximately 3,100 students across all grade levels. It maintains a student-teacher ratio of 12 to 1.
Not surprisingly, many Maine schools built between the 1950s and 1970s are showing their age, and communities like Windham must grapple with the hefty cost of replacing or maintaining them. Some districts fund the projects entirely through local tax dollars, while others try their luck at getting state funding to cover most of the costs.
However, only a small fraction of school construction projects win financial assistance — just nine of 74 applicants won state dollars in the last funding cycle, which occurs every seven years, Maine Monitor noted in a July 6, 2025, article. This year, the Maine DOE received 94 applicants; recipients will be announced later this year.
A Maine Monitor analysis of state data from September 2024 also shows that construction costs in the state have risen significantly in recent years, part of a nationwide trend.
For instance, the cost per square foot to build an elementary school in Maine increased from $270 in 2015 to $661 in 2024.
Last year, Gov. Janet Mills established a commission to review school construction and financing for school renovations, acknowledging that "the need for construction and renovation of public school facilities across the state far outpaces available funding."
Howell, who sits on the commission, said that he is looking at how to increase the funding available to help get expensive projects off the ground.
"What Maine's going to have to figure out is, number one, how do we maintain all the square footage that we have," he said. "But then also the process of prioritizing school funding for school projects. How do we do that moving forward, given that everybody right now is competing for resources at the state level?"
RSU 14 Middle School Project Now Under Way
Windham's new RSU 14 middle school site consists of wetlands, a former horse barn, a private soccer field and a long-retired town gravel pit that held logs and deer carcasses before it was cleaned up prior to construction.
The school district paid about $1.7 million for the land, while the construction itself will cost around $123 million.
The contract, which is a fixed price unless the state or school were to request a large addition to the build, was awarded to Landry/French Construction, a company based in Scarborough, Maine, which has handled multiple school projects across the state. It also oversees the work of 40 subcontractors who set their own bids for labor and materials.
Figuring out how much labor and materials will cost for the RSU 14 project is not easy to pin down, Maine Monitor noted.
Landry/French COO Denis Garriepy said that company received multiple bids for trades needed on the job and evaluated the bids for "completeness," meaning that the firm determined whether each subcontractor had the resources to complete the full scope of the work within the scheduled timeline, and whether the price was reasonable.
That process can take as long as a month, he said, after which Landry/French puts in its bid for the school construction using the subcontractor figures. Labor and materials costs are not broken down in the subcontractor bids.
"From our perspective as a general contractor, it doesn't actually matter, because we're not buying drywall labor, we're not buying drywall material. We're buying the work," Garriepy said. "And that holds true for every single trade, whether it's masonry, drywall, paint, ceilings, electrical or mechanical. That labor and material breakdown is not something we have or even need."
Working Through Rising Costs
Valerie Chiang, the Maine school construction coordinator with the state DOE, noted that a few factors have contributed to the rising cost of these projects. For one, she said, Maine has limited staffing for building projects, which has prompted companies to bring in labor from out of state and pay per diem rates for lodging and other costs.
Laborers must be paid prevailing wage rates for state public works contracts; for example, in Cumberland County this year, a construction worker makes a minimum hourly wage of $21.90. For an electrician, the minimum hourly wage is $37.43.
Regulations and building codes also play a role; energy efficiency standards, for instance, demand an increase in insulation.
"It's kind of an overall increase in everything," Chiang said.
Still, the RSU 14 project has found savings along the way, according to Maine Monitor.
The original estimate for the middle school amounted to $171 million, Howell said, but the district was able to slice about $16 million from the budget, in part through competitive bidding.
The remainder of the budget, about $33 million, included purchasing the land, establishing a project contingency budget and its architectural and engineering services.
Balancing State, Local Funding
Windham and Raymond residents are responsible for about $40 million of the building cost of the new middle school, with the state covering the other $116 million, or about 74 percent. The local contribution covers aspects of the school that go beyond core instruction, such as a greenhouse and a larger gym.
Howell pointed out that the local contribution often makes up for what the state cannot cover. For instance, the school district wants to build an auditorium in the middle school for about $13 million — a cost not covered by state funding.
The district also needs to cover the funding for common areas in the 12 classroom clusters that will be built throughout the school. Each of these spaces, which are about 900 sq. ft., will cost around $1 million.
Construction on the new middle school is about two months into its two-and-a-half year timeline and will eventually replace a pair of aging middle schools in the district. The move to combine both facilities within was not part of the original plan, Howell said.
The consolidated district came into existence in 2009, and while Raymond has attempted to withdraw a few times in the past decade, he said that with this new project both district towns will be locked in together for the next 20 years.
For the annual bond payments of the $40 million local share, Windham will pay 82 percent and Raymond 18 percent. The debt ratio is based on enrollment, Howell said.
