The latest RSU plan would combine operational and capital debt into one regional budget if voters approve it this fall.

Carrie Jones

Jul 01, 2026

The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by Viridian Law.

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BAR HARBOR — One of the biggest changes in the latest proposal to reorganize Mount Desert Island-area schools isn’t about classrooms or governance. It’s about debt.

Under the newest draft of the proposed regional school unit, existing and future operational and capital debt would no longer belong to individual towns.

Instead, those costs would be absorbed by the new regional district and shared among participating communities using the same funding formula now used for Mount Desert Island High School.

Those changes center around assumption of past debt in a plan that takes each school district, dissolves it, and unifies them into one single regional school unit called an RSU.

If voters approve the plan in November, the RSU would manage all the public schools for the towns involved. Depending on the votes, those towns might be: Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Cranberry Isles, Frenchboro, Southwest Harbor, Swan’s Island, Tremont, and Trenton.

For the plan to go forward there must be “yes” votes from Trenton, Bar Harbor, Southwest Harbor, Tremont, and Mount Desert.

Planning would continue throughout 2026. Some board members would not be voted in by the towns initially, but instead selected by each of the town’s individual school boards.

After the certification by the state of the RSU, elections for board members would occur.

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CHANGES

If the plan goes forward, many aspects of how school boards work and budgets approved would change.

The current debt for the Conners Emerson School rebuild in Bar Harbor and the Mount Desert Elementary School repairs will be absorbed by the RSU as a whole.

That means that voters in each town will pay for both these past existing debts and any future debts for future needs.

“Debt would be absorbed,” School Superintendent Michael Zboray said during the meeting.

“Yes,” he confirmed via email, July 1, “the new RSU will absorb all current and future operational and capital debt. The payment will be added to the budget, and each town will pay its apportionment in accordance with the funding formula.”

Tremont’s school needs a potential $20 million in renovations. Pemetic Elementary in Southwest Harbor requires approximately $200k each year for its brick face work. Trenton’s school will also probably need extensive repairs or rebuilds for its building.

“It is better to absorb that through all of the towns,” Zboray said, rather than one town absorbing it independently.

The high school’s projects are already absorbed into the four MDI town’s budgets.

All reserves would no longer be in the town’s reserves, but become the district’s.

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THE TUESDAY MEETING

“We’ll get started in just a few minutes. We just want to see if more people show up,” Zboray told attendees at the reorganization meeting Tuesday, June 30.

The school superintendent stood before a bright screen that read, “a unified future,” and then he explained the core elements of the plan that would reorganize the administration of the area’s schools.

Many of the 15-20 attending in person were Reorganization Planning Committee (RPC) members or school board or Bar Harbor Warrant Committee members.

The online attendance fluctuated between six and 12 during the 90-minute presentation and discussion.

“We believe that even though we have great schools we can provide a better education for our students,” Zboray said.

There are eight elementary schools and a majority of the students end up at Mount Desert Island High School.

“We’re looking at expanding that from pre-K through 12th grade,” he said of the reorganization and that would save money for most towns, he said, though projected budgets and costs are not currently available.

Those budgets and the costs were what worried Nancy Weingarten of Southwest Harbor. She and others said they hoped to see current school budgets for each town in a central location and also be able to determine the current per pupil costs and attendance amounts.

They were cautioned by AOS Board Chair Jessica Stewart and Zboray that those per pupil costs don’t explain the whole picture. For example, schools with out-of-district placements for students with specialized needs impact costs. Similarly, a school with staff that have been there for longer periods of time have higher staff costs because pay increases with longevity.

“Money is a very big issue,” Weingarten said.

She said people in her town are concerned about school budgets.

“I will be posting a projected two-year budget and will post it to the website. It will take me a few weeks to do that,” Zboray said via email.

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HOW THE BUDGET WOULD WORK

Each town’s advisory committee would create a draft recommended budget.

That proposed budget would be given to the whole RSU board, which could change it.

That overarching RSU board—not the local advisory committees—would post the budget and then voters could come to vote on it, similar to how the high school budget gets approved. Typically, there is small turn-out for those high school budget meetings.

There would then have to be a budget vote for annual town meetings in each town after, much like now, for town voters to commit the funds.

In the July 30 presentation, Zboray spoke to the funding model which duplicates the current model used in the system for the high school. That’s a 67% valuation, 33% enrollment funding model.

Zboray put each town’s current Fiscal Year 2026 budgets together as one, then split them according to that funding model. This created data that illustrated what each town would have paid if the RSU had been approved for this year.



It’s believed that people who pay property taxes in Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Cranberry Isles, and Frenchboro would have faced tax increases of varying degrees for the school portion of their tax bills. Those same school taxes in Southwest Harbor, Tremont, Trenton, and Swan’s Island were expected to have decreased.

A Bar Harbor owner with a $650,000 home valuation would likely now support an increase of $468 in their taxes for education. When debt payment for the Conners Emerson School building is included in the mix, that increases by a total of approximately $771. With Mount Desert’s debt payment is included, that increases to a total of approximately $819.

A home owner in Mount Desert with the same valuation would have supported a $965.82 increase for the education portion of their yearly tax bill when the current school improvements are included.

Those increases would have been $781.62 for Frenchboro and $1,206.19 for Cranberry Isles.

The funding formula, if it had been used this year and included the debts of those repairs in Mount Desert and Bar Harbor, showed Southwest Harbor property owners (with that same valuation) saving approximately $214. In Tremont that number would be approximately $926.27, in Swan’s Island it would be approximately $1,021, and Trenton it would be $1,176.

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THE BUILDINGS

“The RSU assumes all the school buildings,” Zboray said.

That means that instead of the towns, the school district would hold ownership and title of the building.

A school could only be closed if a new building replaces it or the voters across the district choose to close that building.

The plan before voters does not include a new middle school or those sorts of changes. A committee is being formed to look into that possibility in the future. No schools are shut in this plan.

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GOALS

Zboray stressed that the reorganization would empower educators by creating unity through programs.

Strains on the current system are specialized programs, unequal educational access, structural inefficiencies, and transportation, he said.

“We’re straining to find special education teachers,” he said.

Special needs and students with unique needs need to be serviced, but that creates staffing challenges to find really qualified educators to meet the needs of the “most struggling students,” he said.

For unequal educational access, he said that in larger schools there might be gifted and talented programs or special math programs.

Structural inefficiencies, include things such as the central office having to report singularly for each school to the state government. This is also taxing, he said.

One woman in the audience said that the schools are separate but the “general vibe” is that they are all already supporting each other and it supports them emotionally.

The goal, Stewart said is “to feel like we are one united team and we have the back of every single child.”

Administrative costs will likely stay the same currently, Zboray said.

“There could be some changes even before we get to the RSU,” Zboray said.

There are no projections of the budget going forward with the new system, Zboray said.

“That work will happen once the RSU passes,” Zboray said.

Running projected budgets is a good idea, Stewart said, but there are many moving parts. Zboray added that any projections will not be written in stone.

“We are not a business. We are educating students,” Zboray said.

But there is a fiduciary responsibility as well, he said.

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GOVERNANCE

There would be comprehensive pre-K through 12 programming, eight elementary schools and one high school.

The governance system would change quite a bit.

There would be 15 members elected by the entire district to have the budgetary and board decisions rather than individual school boards in towns having those responsibilities.

All members of this overarching board would have equal voting on the board. There would be three members from Bar Harbor and Mount Desert, two from Southwest Harbor, Trenton, and Tremont, and one for each of the other towns.

They would be up for election for the entire region, not just their individual towns.

The local school boards would be “school advisory councils” and would be the principal, an RSU board member, teachers, parents, a middle or high school student, and support staff and serve as a “dedicated avenue for community feedback,” Zboary said.

They would not have the power to make decisions. That would be done in the bigger governing body similar to how the Hancock County Commissioners or High School Board work.

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LINKS TO LEARN MORE AND ADDITIONAL INFORMATION

Reorganization Plan – Core elements

The slide show presented June 30.

https://www.youtube-nocookie.com/embed/2uOWIUbb6dg?rel=0&autoplay=0&showinfo=0&enablejsapi=0

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