Private school hopes to double its enrollment with new Bangor building

A private school in Bangor is planning to construct a new building that will house all students and allow enrollment to double.

Penobscot Christian School is looking to build two new buildings adjacent to its grammar school  at 1423 Ohio St. in Bangor. One 4,500-square-foot building will be a gymnasium and the other, at 18,000 square feet, will be a new school building, according to the application submitted to the city.

A driveway and a parking lot with 104 spaces will also be added as part of the project, according to the application, which Bangor-based Haley Ward developed.

The Bangor Planning Board granted the project a land development permit on Tuesday.

The new building will allow the Penobscot Christian School to consolidate its 195 students under one roof and leave enough space to welcome more students as the private school sees an increase in enrollment, according to Chip Haskell, a project manager for Haley Ward.

An increase in the school’s enrollment would buck national trends that show private school numbers in the U.S. have held roughly steady in recent years. In the last decade, private schools have consistently educated about 10 percent of the country’s kindergarten through 12th-grade students, though the number of students have fluctuated between fewer than 5.3 million to nearly 5.8 million, according to the Pew Research Center.

The anticipated future enrollment capacity will be about 400 students, according to the land development application.

Currently, the kindergarten through 12th-grade students are split up into two buildings. The grammar school on Ohio Street teaches prekindergarten through sixth grade while the logic and rhetoric school on Union Street holds seventh- through 12th-graders.

Construction on the project, which will be completed in phases, is slated to begin next month. Each building will have two years to be completed, according to city rules.

Alison Hamilton, headmaster of Penobscot Christian School, did not immediately return requests for comment.