Milford Middle School’s role in educating generations of First State students comes to close at the end of the school year.
The city’s school board voted yesterday to shutter the 83-year-old building, considered by many the oldest school building in the state, and move next year’s batch of sixth and seventh graders to Milford Central Academy, joining the city’s eighth grade class there. Next fall, Milford’s ninth graders will attend class at Milford High School for the first time.
School Board President Pat Emory, who called the vote “heartbreaking," says the building’s maintenance and renovation costs were too expensive to sustain.
“It was built in 1929 and with all upgrades that needed to be done it just came to the point in time where it wasn’t feasible to keep investing additional money into it.”
Emory adds closing the school, which houses roughly 900 students, will save the school district about 400 thousand dollars a year.
“We had consultants come in and do assessments of the the property and the engineering associated with it and they looked at it as a whole to see whether it was feasible to fix it up or just to go ahead and close it for the time being. So we made a decision after all the information was put forward to go ahead and close it,” said Emory.
Emory says community leaders are seeking a new use for the school to prevent it from being torn down.