Fond memories of Gale School

Quite a few long-time residents had found memories of the Gale School.

Selectman Reggie Caldwell said it was the first school he ever attended. He can still recall taking the bus from his home on Route 140 and watching his teachers write on the old blackboards with chalk. “In those days, there was discipline,” he said.

Sue Roberts and Doralyn Harper, both former members of the School Board, remember bringing their children to the schoolhouse for many years.

The Gale Scholl was first opened in 1892 to bring together students from several one-room schoolhouses scattered around town. It served as the town’s first real school.

But age and wear have caught up with the unique wooden structure and it is now closed to students. It sits next to Belmont Middle School, abandoned and deteriorating. It is used primarily as a storage facility for the school district.

And unless something dramatic happens fairly quickly, the Gale School will likely be razed sometime in the next year.

That was the proposal put forward at the Shaker Regional School Board meeting in Canterbury on Thursday night.

And most town officials agree there seems to be little realistic alternative for the old structure.

On Friday, Belmont Heritage Commission Vice-Chairman Linda Frawley said she was looking to Chairman Wallace Rhodes to call a special meeting of the group soon. Shaker School District Superintendent Mike Cozort has said he would be willing to talk to the group, as well as to members of the Belmont Historical Society.

But even Rhodes admits that it was hard to see how the Gale School could be saved without the help of some wealthy outside benefactor. “I don’t know what you can do.”

The Belmont Mill was saved and restored with funds from a Community Development Block Grant, but the grant requires the structure be used as it is now — for community services like the Belmont Senior Center, a daycare facility and a doctor’s office.

“I don’t know if there’s any more unmet needs like that in town,” Rhodes said. “If there is, then that’s a possibility (for grant funding).”

District officials have been trying to resolve the question of what to do with the Gale School for years. The Fire Department does not like the aged wooden structure sitting so close to school buildings and the School Board would like to use the space where the building now sits to create a “turn-around” for school buses coming to the middle school.

And the costs of restoring or renovating the structure are not cheap. The most recent estimates of simply roofing and moving the building even a short distance on its current site have been in the neighborhood of $300,000.

Several years ago a citizens group proposed a complete renovation of the building with the aim of turning it into offices for the school district, but that too was an expensive proposition. At the annual School District meeting, voters rejected the $1 million plan.

Longtime community activist Ron Mitchell, who also sent his children to the Gale School, said it’s too bad neither the town nor the school district appears to be able to raise enough funds to save the old building, but it does not seem to fit into other municipalities plans right now.

“I was one of the ones who got up to speak about doing something with it about five years ago. You could put in a new foundation...You could move it,” he said. “We don’t have a lot of these kinds of historic buildings in Belmont because we used to be part of Gilmanton and this wasn’t the prosperous center of town. We have the mill and the Province Road House on Route 107, and that’s about it.”

Selectboard Chairman Brian Watterson agrees that there’s a nostalgic sadness about possibly losing the Gale School, but he agrees with Mitchell that the structure does not seem to fit into either the school district’s or the town’s immediate needs for the future.

“When you’re talking about maybe 4,000-square-feet and spending one million to do what? And what you need is 10,000-square feet,” he said. “The School Board is in an interesting position because if they chose to spend education dollars on that building it probably would not be appropriate. It’s not an education-related issue and their mandate is to educate people.

“I understand that someone (at the School Board meeting) said it’s really a town issue even though it’s on school grounds, but it isn’t really,” he added. “You can call it a town issue if you want to but when the town is looking at four or five other major projects like it is right now, this one is not going to rise to the level of getting priority.”

Doralyn Harper, who worked for the town and served on the School Board for many years, said the board is wise to try to do something about the Gale School at this time. “When I was on the board we tossed it around and around, and we couldn’t come up with anything to do with it. To me, we have to take some action to do something,” she said.

“It needs a new roof, it needs repairs,” Sue Roberts said. “While it may have many potential uses, it’s not a part of what you’re trying to do there now so it’s like having an elephant at an ants’ tea party. What are you doing to do with it? There’s no easy solution or it would have been done by now.”