It's been sitting, mostly ignored, at 80 Burban Drive for nearly two decades now. Built in the 1950s as part of a generation of schools that included Brushy Plain School (which became the Mary T. Murphy School) and Damascus School (renamed the Mary Tisko school in 1983), the Branford Hills School was last used as an elementary school in 1991. For a brief period in the 1990s, it was used by a technical school.
Since then, it's still put to use, although not with great frequency. The School Aged Child Care program uses the spot for day care, Friends of the Library and BCTV use it for storage, and meetings and professional development seminars are irregularly held there. During elections, it serves as a polling place.
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But the building is old and in need of repairs, including $350,000 in roof repairs. And those repairs will eventually have to be done -- or the Branford Hills School building will just have to go. As Branford Schools Facilities Director Mark Deming told the RTM education committee in May, the roof needs the repair funds as soon as possible.
"From a maintenance standpoint, I can't keep it up for the next five years," he said.
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And as long as it belongs to the town, Branford taxpayers are paying for the building.
A $15,000 building facilities study commissioned by the town should be out by the end of the summer, and it's expected to provide data that could ultimately settle the school's future.
On June 13, RTM members cut roof repairs for the Branford Hills School from a $2.05 million bond measure, thanks largely to a persuasive argument from RTM member Peter Black. Black said if Branford Hills had some merit -- historical or architectural, for example -- maybe it'd be worth keeping.
"It looks like a prison. It's falling apart," Black told the RTM in June. "Maybe we could use this site for a senior center, but we'd probably have to raze the building."
In a conversation with Patch, Black said Branford is a town with plenty of buildings and plenty of space.
"I'm not sure anybody using the building now couldn't find somewhere better to go," he said. "We've got a lot of buildings, and the whole reason we commissioned this study is to find out which ones we want to keep and what we want to use them for."
What do you think? Do you participate in activities that use the Branford Hills School? Do you have fond memories of the school? Or is it time for us to move on and repurpose the space?
