Damon Lincoln, 9, of Wiscasset said he was a little nervous about going to a different school this year. “But mostly excited,” the incoming fourth grader said.

Lincoln and some of his siblings were part of Wiscasset Primary School’s last classes, now the new students at the newly renamed Wiscasset Elementary School. Older brother Andrew Lincoln is starting his senior year at the newly renamed Wiscasset Middle High School. Like his younger siblings, his new school year comes with change. His class along with the freshmen, sophomores and juniors are sharing the Gardiner Road building with seventh and eighth graders.

“It’s pretty cool,” he said about the added grades. He already knows a few of the younger students from the Wiscasset Recreation Center.

The Lincoln children and mother Kristy Lincoln joined hundreds of other celebrants Aug. 27 as her mother Lynn Lincoln helped cut the ribbon at Wiscasset Elementary.

Lynn Lincoln has worked in food service at all of the town’s schools and is among staff who moved to the school on Federal Street. She knows the school well, not only from having worked in it before, but she went to kindergarten there in one of the school’s earlier incarnations.

Many parents and grandparents at the celebration had been either elementary or middle grade students at the school their children and grandchildren will now attend.

The redone parking lots and a new one were filled.

In interviews and comments to the crowd, Superintendent of Schools Heather Wilmot, Wiscasset Elementary Principal Mona Schlein and others praised the entire staff’s efforts over the summer to paint classrooms and otherwise prepare the school to serve pre-kindergarten through grade six.

Wilmot, Schlein and the school’s administrative assistant Cindy Collamore — another former student at the school — cited a sense of family and community they were getting from event-goers.

“Remarkable is the word that comes to mind,” Wilmot said. Around her in a hallway, students, their families and townspeople moved in and out of classrooms.

“It’s very heart-warming, a hometown feeling,” Collamore said. “I feel very proud ... very emotional, because this has been such an amazing time in the town’s history, coming back to where we were years ago to the Wiscasset Elementary School.” She was among the former kindergarten students cutting the ribbon. Collamore has grandchildren at the school this year. Her children attended the school when it was a middle school.

She was near tears earlier as she watched the event come together, days before the start of school with a caring, loving and giving staff in place, she said. “We are a very blessed town.”

“I think it’ll work out really well when everybody settles in (to the school),” head custodian Tim Delano said, drill in hand, moments before the celebration. He traded the drill for a pair of scissors as the one doing the cutting of the ribbon. Like all those who held the ribbon as he cut it, Delano went to kindergarten there.

Lori Munson, who works in food service at the school, said she was surprised and honored to be asked to take part.

At a school committee meeting hours later at Wiscasset Middle High, the committee’s vice chairman and past Wiscasset High vice principal Eugene Stover said he was overwhelmed by the interest residents showed in the local schools by attending the celebration.

“The place was really humming.”