Wiscasset Primary School’s move-up day is usually only for the fourth-graders, Principal Mona Schlein said. It’s their send-off with diplomas and cake as they prepare to enter Wiscasset Middle School the next fall.

But the whole school took part in this year’s celebration, held Monday; and all the grades got cake.

“We’re all moving up,” Schlein said in an interview.

June 22 was the last full day of school of the last school year for Wiscasset Primary. Residents decided to close it, and, on June 9, gave the school committee the go-ahead to hand the Gardiner Road property over to the town; voters also authorized selectmen to sell it.

Students and staff will move to the middle school, which school department officials are now calling an elementary school. Grades seven and eight will move to Wiscasset High School. The school committee is still working on names for both schools.

The school-wide participation and the added cake distinguished Monday’s ceremony at the primary school from past move-up days. But the songs and staff remarks to the audience in the gym did not center on the school’s closure. 

“It was not about doors closing. This was a farewell celebration, and that’s what it was, a celebration,” Schlein said afterward.

“It was wonderful, and it was bittersweet,” Wiscasset Primary parent and volunteer Andrea Main said. “But next year will be great as well, because we’re going there together,” Main said about the move to the school on Federal Street.

Sheri Eckert, whose daughter Addison was finishing kindergarten, felt similarly. “It’s sad, because our experience here has been phenomenal. It really has,” she said.

But the staff has been supportive and has worked to make the students feel comfortable about the move, Eckert said.

For Monday’s celebration, her daughter’s class sang songs about dinosaurs.

The school also honored its volunteers and new retirees. And families and other attendees sang the school song, which Schlein said music teacher Carole Drury wrote years earlier: “We are one in Wiscasset. We are one in the school ... And they’ll know we are friends by our love.”