It's official: Starting next year, seventh and eighth graders will attend Wiscasset High School. The Wiscasset School Committee on Nov. 20 voted unanimously to move the grades. The vote formalized plans the panel made on Nov. 17.

“It’s a good move,” Wiscasset Middle School Principal Bruce Scally said later, in a brief joint-interview with Wiscasset High School Principal Cheri Towle.

“It’s a great move, educationally for the kids,” Towle said. As she did during talks with the committee in recent weeks, Towle cited the access the move will give the younger grades to high school-level courses; the good fit it will be with the town’s move to proficiency-based diplomas, which give students choices in how they learn and how they show what they’ve learned; and the opportunity the switch in schools will give seventh and eighth graders to acclimate to the high school. They’ll have their own section of the building but will be a part of the school’s community, which in turn could lead them to stay on for their high school years instead of choosing another high school, she said.

Thursday’s special meeting in the middle school cafeteria took just minutes. Before the vote, the committee’s vice chairman Glen Craig asked if a new vote would be needed before each school year to keep the seventh and eighth grades in the high school; it would not, since the motion would be to authorize the superintendent to move the grades beginning in the 2015-2016 year, Interim Superintendent Lyford Beverage said. That covers subsequent years, without the need for annual votes, according to Beverage.

After the holidays, Towle plans to put together a committee of teachers from both the high and middle schools to start planning the move. “We’re truly glad that the school committee made this decision early so we can plan for this and make a smooth transition,” she said.

Thursday’s vote surfaced as a discussion point at a public hearing held later in the evening, on the Dec. 9 referendum that will decide whether or not Wiscasset Primary School closes next year. In response to residents’ questions, school committee members said the move of the two grades will be beneficial regardless of the outcome of next month’s vote at the polls. Committee member Chelsea Haggett, who had dissented in the committee’s Sept. 15 vote to close the primary school, told residents that if she had known then that grades seven and eight would be going to the high school, she still would have voted against closing the primary school. She still felt that the middle school was the one to close, she said.