DOVER-FOXCROFT — The $1.6 million renovation of SeDoMoCha Middle School will be completed within budget, one of the few school projects in the state that will do so this year, according to a school official.

Superintendent Donald Siviski said Tuesday that the project also will be done in time for the opening of school.

“I’m anticipating a regular opening of school,” he said.

The middle school was closed in June 1999 because the ventilation system had been contaminated with asbestos and industrial debris from a previous project. While renovation work was conducted, SAD 68 housed and educated middle school pupils in 11 portable buildings.

Siviski said the school had to be totally renovated from the cement floors to the roof rafters. Everything had to be removed from the building, environmentally cleaned and returned to the school. The superintendent said the ventilation, heating and electrical systems all had to be rebuilt.

Work is now being done to finish the floors in the classrooms so the school equipment now stored in the gymnasium can be returned to the rooms. Once the gymnasium is emptied, its floor will be refinished.

Siviski said the district will keep three of the 11 portable classrooms. Since the district deeded over the Mayo Street School to the town, the fifth- and sixth-grade pupils who attended there will be relocated to the middle school.

Until the district receives state approval for an addition to the middle school, some pupils will be housed inside the middle school and others in the portable buildings, according to Siviski.

The superintendent said pupils in the sixth and seventh grades will be housed inside the middle school.

Two fifth-grade classrooms will be inside the school, and two will be in portable classrooms. Three eighth-grade groups will have classrooms inside the school, and two will be set up in the portables, he said.