NEWPORT — The auditorium chairs once promised to be salvaged from the soon-to-be-demolished Rogers High School and given away will now be scrapped with the rest of the building, the School Committee decided this week.

In May, Superintendent Colleen Burns Jermain announced the school district would be offering up the auditorium seats as a part of the demolition process to make way for the high school’s new building. 

While evaluating the cost to remove the chairs, the contractor informed the School Building Committee they would not be as easy to remove as initially thought and the total cost to preserve them would be over $12,000. 

“It was too much of an investment for the limited number of chairs they were going to pull out,” School Building Committee co-chair Rebecca Bolan told the rest of the School Committee at a special meeting Tuesday.

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About 15 people were set to receive 39 chairs from the auditorium, although the initial number of people interested in receiving chairs was much higher, Bolan said. 

Additionally, removing the chairs was a much more painstaking process than initially thought, Bolan said, as they would not be able to stand up on their own and risked getting damaged during the removal process. The chairs are attached to the neighboring chairs with a minimum of five to a row, sharing dividers with the seat next to it. 

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“They fit together very, very intricately,” Downes Construction Project Manager Scott Kozuch said. “To actually handle this material, store it, transport it to another place, reassemble it successfully and install it would take some doing. So it’s not as simple as it may seem.”