Fast times at Windham high

Residents and officials in Windham are happy to be able to put the issue of a secondary access road for their new $55 million high school behind them. 

"It's pretty big relief. I think that my life has been pretty peaceful for the past three days," Dr. Bruce Anderson told me during a conference call with him and Windham's superintendent. "It's a relief that we resolved this without going to court. It put a lot of peoples' minds at ease...the road issue will not get in the way of the school opening."

The brand new state of the art facility ran into trouble this past year after Thomas McPherson, the town's fire chief, told both selectmen and the School Board that he would not sign off on the building unless a second egress was put in place for emergency vehicles. 

Whether this mean a full town road or a gravel path was left up to the boards and the abutters. 

Complicating the issue, members of the School Board and some residents called into question the legal requirement to have the road built. State officials had signed off on the design plans three years earlier and many felt that this was all the approval that they needed to go ahead and open the school next August. 

While the state fire marshall and state education officials ultimately deferred to McPherson's judgement, there was a push to settle the matter in court. 

"What it came down to was the majority of the board felt that spending that money to guarantee that this school would open without further legal battles was worth it," Anderson said. 

The vote - 3 to 2 for spending $500,000 of the district's budget on the construction of a Class V town road connecting the high school to the south side of town - was razor thin and taken during a non-public session.

"Although it is not the way I would have settled this question, the issue should never ever come back to the school district again," said Chairman Barbara Coish - who voted against signing the agreement with selectmen and abutters. During a Tuesday night meeting Coish criticized the agreement, saying that she could not vote for something that would effectively bypass the voters.

Two earlier attempts to appropriate the funds for the secondary road failed to pass, most recently during a special election in September.

After a few months of political maneuvering between the two boards, everything appears to have been settled and the school's opening is no  longer in doubt. Everyone I have spoken to agrees that they've let out a "big sigh of relief."