Mount Desert Selectboard Hopes For More Answers About Its Role in Process.
Aug 04, 2026
The Bar Harbor Story is generously sponsored by First National Bank.
BAR HARBOR—This Monday, a split school committee voted in favor of recommending the school reorganization plan to the Bar Harbor voters while that same night, the Mount Desert Selectboard and its town officials hope to find more clarity about its role in the process.
After two postponements, the plan to reorganize how the island’s schools are administered will likely be voted on by all Mount Desert Island region towns in November. Proponents of the plan say that it will help put all MDI region students on a level playing field as they head into the regional high school and cut administrative redundancies.
The plan takes each individual school district in each town, 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.
Unlike other island towns, Bar Harbor requires related government committees or boards to vote on whether or not to recommend some plans or land use ordinance amendments to the voters.
The town’s School Committee, Warrant Committee, and Town Council will all have recommendations that will appear on the Bar Harbor ballot. They will only appear on that town’s ballot.
School Board Vice Chair Misha Mytar and new board member Alana Beard voted against the recommendation. It was Beard’s first meeting after being elected this June when she ran unopposed for Mike Kiers’ seat. Mytar was reelected after running unopposed in June as well.
Less than a half hour after the Bar Harbor School Committee meeting, August 3, multiple members of the reorganization committee—including Chair Jessica Stewart—headed to the Bar Harbor Warrant Committee to present about that same plan. The Warrant Committee has not yet voted on its recommendations nor has the Town Council. The Warrant Committee will likely do that later this month. The Town Council will most likely do so in early September if it moves the item to the town warrant for that November vote.
Also at the Warrant Committee meeting, River Qadesh and Ed Ryan were nominated to fill Warrant Committee vacancies. Both had run in the last election.
Multiple aspects of the island-wide reorganization plan were discussed at both meetings.
In order for any plan to move forward, all the island towns and Trenton must vote in favor.
MOUNT DESERT MOVES QUESTION FORWARD
In a different part of the island, but at a simultaneous meeting, the Mount Desert Selectboard, moved the school reorganization vote to the town’s November ballot.
Between now and November, the town will have a public hearing, that will likely occur approximately a month before the vote—so early October.
Town Manager Alex Kimball said the town needs clarity as to whether the Mount Desert ballot question about the potential reorganization has an appropriations’ vote for the town. If so, he said, the Selectboard would have to recommend (or not) to voters whether they should vote in favor or against.
It’s a similar process to what’s happening now in Bar Harbor with the new positive recommendation from the Bar Harbor School Board and upcoming recommendations (in favor or against) from the Bar Harbor Town Council and Warrant Committee.
“So, if it’s an appropriations vote, there would need to be an actual recommendation by the select board on it, but it’s not (that) it doesn’t fit neatly into the parameters of, you know, put in funding to buy this or don’t put in funding to buy this because the actual impacts are a little less certain. So that’s a question that between now and then we got to get answered as to whether there is an obligation from the select board to make a recommendation or not and that’s something I think all the towns have to sort of get worked out as they go on it,” Kimball said.
He said it was likely that all towns involved have to work that out.
Mount Desert Town Clerk Claire Woolfolk said, “According to our charter, if the Selectboard has a referendum question, we do have to have a public hearing at least within 10 days prior to the election. So, I would say you’re putting a referendum out there—even though you don’t really have much of a choice—that according to the charter, we still have to have a public hearing.”
Kimball said that he’d have to get more clarity about how that appropriations’ piece plays into the town’s process.
“First and foremost we need to know exactly what the, either the equation or at least the algorithm is they use,” Selectboard Chair John Macauley said. “Because I can’t hear 67-33 (the high school funding formula) again without having my head explode.”
SERVING STUDENTS ACROSS THE DISTRICT
One of the finer points about the potential plan is that each school would no longer belong to its town, but to the RSU as a whole. This includes the land that the school is on, not just the building.
The same people who currently take care of the school, Superintendent Mike Zboray told the school committee members, would continue to.
“It’s more of a psychological thing of whether its ours or its ours,” Zboray said, stressing the word “ours.”
“This plan is to help unify our district,” Zboray said. “We feel that we do provide a great education, but we think it can be better.”
That would happen, he said, if the students all have similar resources and it was easier for schools to collaborate.
Currently, he said, students from some schools have to catch up at the high school for something like irregular math or specialized program gaps tied to staffing shortages.
Beard questioned how the individual school’s would maintain curriculum choices if the goal was to have similarity in outcomes when students hit high school and if there’d be more curriculum direction from the proposed RSU to each school.
Right now, it’s more around specialized programs, Superintendent Mike Zboray said.
He also said it strengthens the community as a whole on the island.
In the 1800s, there were 32 schools in the area. This was a time before motorized vehicles. Those slowly whittled down and closed to the current schools in Bar Harbor, Tremont, Trenton, Mount Desert, Southwest, Cranberry Isles, and Frenchboro.
“Our volunteer jobs are to always consider our constituents are our kids,” Bar Harbor School Committee Chair Marie Yarborough said.
She also—much like Carol Chappell at the Warrant Committee meeting and Mytar—mentioned what she’d been hearing from other Bar Harbor residents.
“We’ve worked really hard to get this new school and we’re making leeway and we’re getting some new housing and we’ve got this wheel chugging along,” Yarborough said people were saying.
She said people think that it’s like other towns are putting more students on the train that Bar Harbor built.
“I don’t think that that’s the case,” she emphasized, though it’s what she’s heard. For her, though she pays taxes as well, it’s more about positive direction for the island’s kids.
“We want to think about what the future looks like for our grandchildren,” she said.
“This a future facing project,” AOS Board Chair Jessica Stewart said to the School Committee members and reiterated later at the Warrant Committee. “It’s about a long term vision.”
HOW THE DEBT WOULD WORK
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 financial changes center around assumption of past debt in a plan that takes each school budget, dissolves it, and unifies them into one single regional school unit called an RSU.
“All debt gets absorbed,” Stewart said. “There’s not much more to say about that.”
The RSU also absorbs each town’s school’s building title, capital, and operational debt as well as the reserves of the schools that were built up in each town.
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,” Zboray said during the meeting.
He confirmed via email, July 1, that “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.”
All reserves would no longer be in the town’s reserves, but become the district’s.
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.
REDUNDANCIES AND STUDENT SERVICES
Stewart stressed to the Warrant Committee that part of the plan was to allow administrators and educators with less redundancy, access to the best way to serve students with certain kinds of special education programming along with advanced math and other classes. It would also reduce the superintendent’s workload as he drives around attending multiple school board meetings.
“This is really a future facing project,” Stewart said.
Another aspect is to address staffing shortages. Currently employees are employed by one school. But part-time positions could become full-time positions when spread across the district, a collaborative structure that isn’t currently allowed.
It aims to smooth out the cost so that all towns are paying something closer to the same amount in terms of education, Stewart said.
THE COST
The plan estimates the changes for home owners in each town per $100k of their property value. If all the debt payment for Mount Desert and Bar Harbor is absorbed, the average home owner’s change in cost would be $101.75 in Bar Harbor for every $100k of their property value.
It’s estimated that even with paying Bar Harbor and Mount Desert’s debt service for a new school building (Bar Harbor) and repairs to an existing one (Mount Desert) some towns (such as Tremont, Trenton, and Swan’s Island) would have decreased costs next year.
That number is an estimate and it does not include what might happen if Tremont, Southwest Harbor or Trenton schools—all which need varying repairs to their buildings—would occur after that first year.
During the School Board meeting, multiple members asked Zboray for additional columns of information on the cost spread sheet included in presentations.
If the outer islands chose not to join the RSU, it would shift those numbers slightly, Stewart said when asked by Warrant Committee Chair Meg Kelly.
Warrant Committee member Erin Cough asked about the school’s capital improvement reserve, which is helped by the town and if that would go to the RSU’s reserves so that it could maintain the buildings.
The maintenance of the building would be the responsibility of the RSU, Stewart said.
“We have several million dollars of CIP that we do,” Cough said. “It’s probably a little different from some of the other towns. Bar Harbor would potentially be making up a larger portion.”
Bar Harbor Finance Director Sarah Gilbert and MDI RSS Business Manager Nancy Thurlow would have to figure that out said Bar Harbor Town Clerk Liz Graves.
“That is a primary question that she’s going to get very specific answers on to the Council and you guys before you vote.”
Stewart said it’s not a reserve in the traditional sense and doesn’t just roll into the RSU resolve. It’s being worked out, she said.
“It’s complicated,” Graves said. “And we’ll know before anyone takes a final vote.”
However, the School Committee took a final recommendation vote earlier that afternoon.
“People want to know what’s broken,” Warrant Committee member Kate St. Denis said.
She also suggested showing voters the perceived savings because of tremendous redundancies.
HOW THE BUDGET WOULD WORK
Chappell asked about how budgets will be created and what the town’s warrant committee’s role would be.
It would be quite different, Stewart said.
The budget would be like a high school town budget, not through the recommendation process that currently occurs in Bar Harbor where the Warrant Committee reviews and recommends changes (or not) of the school budget.
The budget would be created at each school, then combined with other budgets to create one large budget. That budget would be voted on at a meeting governed by the new board that would consist of elected representatives of all towns. There will be a budget validation vote at the town level.
The RSU reserves ownership of all buildings.
“You’re just creating a bigger body that’s looking at what’s best for your school,” Zboray said.
The RSU wouldn’t be able to close a town’s school or give it away unless it was replaced (not necessarily through a new building) and approved by the town’s voters.
The new RSU would absorb all construction debt. Operational debt would also be absorbed.
The whole RSU would vote on the budget across the district. It would not be on the Bar Harbor ballot the way it is currently.
Zboray said the plan delivers fairness in the tax system.
“It seems kind of silly that there’s that kind of disparity,” Zboray said of the cost per student in some towns as opposed to others.
Tyson Starling, a member of the Reorganization Committee and the Bar Harbor School Board, said, “The benefit that Bar Harbor will receive is not going to be in taxes. We are not going to see a reduction in taxes.”
The broader picture is that the town would get to pool resources such as for buses, he said.
“We’re like ten little businesses right now and it would become more consolidated in that regard,” Starling explained of how the schools work.
THE BOARD AND GOVERNANCE
RSU Committee Member Cindy Lambert said the make-up of the board is similar to the AOS board and high school board, but outer island communities (if they chose to join the RSU and it passes), would have a vote.
Chappell said many in Bar Harbor felt they would not have equitable representation when compared to a community like Frenchboro, which currently has no students.
Many towns have warrant committees and this would change the relationship of those committees with the budget, Chappell said.
“That would be a changed relationship,” Stewart said. “That process would no longer exist.”
If approved, the high school board would dissolve and it would be part of the RSU.
It becomes a 15-member board where people vote for other town’s board members. That is the board with the power to govern.
But there would also be local school advisory councils that provide input on the hiring process for school administration hires. Teaching hires would be run by Conners Emerson Principal Dr. Heather Weir Webster then go to Zboray then to the larger board.
WHERE STUDENTS GO TO SCHOOL
Currently nothing about building use or where students go to school would change, Stewart said.
“Nobody switches to different buildings and that’s not part of this,” Stewart said.
But, this plan is one of only two paths for a combined island-wide middle school if that’s a future goal, Zboray said during the Bar Harbor School Board meeting.
Warrant Committee member Erin Cough asked about who would vote for a consolidation of middle schools if that next step happened. If the Conners-Emerson became a new middle school, she wondered, who would vote on that.
Stewart said that was extremely unlikely and that there wouldn’t be voter support for a middle school if it wasn’t in a centralized location.
Cough then asked if there was a change in use from Bar Harbor’s school from kindergarten through eighth grade to something like kindergarten through sixth grade, who would make the decision.
The RSU board would, Stewart said. The three elected members of the larger RSU board from Bar Harbor would be part of that decision.
Cough asked if the town’s solar system became too expensive, the RSU board could move away from that use?
It could, Stewart said, as any prudent board might move away from something that proved to have excessive costs.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
The link to the Warrant Committee discussion on YouTube
If Approved, School Reorganization Plan Could Open Door to Island-Wide Middle School
A Summer of Planning Ahead for Safety at New Conners Emerson School.
Proposed School Reorganization Would Spread Existing and Future School Debt Across All Member Towns.
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