Tremont officials questioned local control, Southwest Harbor pressed for more financial information, & a Bar Harbor panel explored what an islandwide school district could change for school community.
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MOUNT DESERT ISLAND REGION—With a November vote approaching on whether to combine Mount Desert Island’s eight public school communities into a single regional school unit, recent meetings in Tremont, Southwest Harbor, and Bar Harbor have revealed three slightly different sets of questions about what that change would mean.
In recent meetings in those towns, officials and residents focused on different pieces of the proposal: the overall governance of local schools, how taxes and future debt would be shared, whether the new structure would make it easier to address staffing shortages, and what would actually change for students.
With the measure headed to voters in November, those conversations are beginning to show what the communities in the school region are being asked to weigh—not simply whether to create a new regional school unit, but how much local control communities are willing to trade for a system designed to share resources across them and meant to help students enter high school with similar access to prior resources.
TREMONT SELECT BOARD VOTES NOT TO RECOMMEND
The Tremont Select Board did not vote on recommending or not recommending the potential AOS 91 school reorganization at its September 8 meeting because Vice Chair McKenzie Jewett was absent.
At its September 21 meeting, board members voted to not recommend the proposed reorganization with a unanimous 5-0.
At its September 8 meeting, both members of the Select Board and members of the public had asked for some more information, mostly potential budget amounts and the affect on taxpayers, to be brought back to the September 21 meeting.
Select Board Member Eric Eaton asked if the Reorganization Planning Committee (RPC) had come up with any projected actual budgets for the proposed RSU combining all of the schools into one budget, which was a question he had on September 8.
AOS 91 Board Chair and RPC member Jessica Stewart responded that she had asked the AOS administration to work on some of those numbers, but she had not gotten any results from that back as of yet. She did say that Superintendent Mike Zboray has said that if you pool the AOS budgets, you run at about an aggregate 7% increase per year and she thinks that the formation of an RSU would bring that down.
An audience member asked if it was true that Tremont was planning on having to do some renovations to its school.
Select Board Chair Jamie Thurlow responded that “it’s kind of a separate topic, but yes.”
“I see this as really a future facing project. I see this as a critical step to making those changes that would let us improve services…. l think the community wants to have a lot of conversation about: Do we combine Pemetic and Tremont? Do we do this? What would we do to resolve some of these small cohort issues? But it was really clear, going to public forums and trying to put something together, that the community didn’t want us to say, ‘this is the plan for putting schools together.’ They would like to have a lot of conversation about how that happens and I think that is appropriate and correct,” Stewart said. “In order to do something like combining Pemetic and Tremont or combining or creating an island wide middle school, whatever the community thinks is the right route to go as we face some of the demographic changes and shifts across the district, we have to become some kind of different structure than we are right now. It would have to be the same kind of process that we just went through and it would have to be some kind of RSU or some other kind of . . . The only two options are really to become an RSU or some sort of private and special act like the way the high school is formed, which would be a similarly lengthy process.”
Eaton then asked about the structure of the district, as far as what kids go where, if the reorganization passes.
Stewart responded that “all kids stay in the same places,” and then the RPC’s plan is that it would begin discussing whether or not it would be best to have one island wide middle school, then the board would form a committee to work on the topic and the RSU board would decide, but the approach would be based around community forums.
“One of my biggest issues is the representation from each town and so, now your saying that board is kind of going to head up what is happens to these schools,” Eaton said.
Select Board member Ben Harper said, “It’s not gonna kind of, it is.”
“So that brings me back to my concern last time. I understand how you came up with the amount of board members from each town. I don’t think it’s fair,” Eaton said. “I think that all the kids should be, just because there are more kids in Bar Harbor, doesn’t make it, their kids more valuable, or less valuable, we should, every town should have the same amount of board members.”
Stewart responded that it is kind of a compromise position because some people in Bar Harbor think they should have more seats because there are so many more kids in the Bar Harbor school.
At Bar Harbor meetings, officials also said that the amount of monetary contribution from the town was also a concern that correlated to the number of seats on the board.
Thurlow said, “I don’t want to lose that control. If Jandrea says, ‘you know what, we need to have a renovation,’ we will try our best to sell the heck out of it and sell it to the taxpayers in Tremont, but now we have to sell it to the island. I think it would take a small miracle to pull that off.”
He said that losing early local control wouldn’t be a good move for Tremont.
“Why does this have to happen first before we talk about combining schools or shuffling kids, or like why, why does this have to happen first?” asked Jewett.
“Because we are legally different school districts. Like Southwest is a school district. Tremont is a school district,” Stewart said.
The only way currently for students to be moved out of one town’s school to another, she stressed is to have a superintendent agreement for each child.
At Southwest Harbor’s reorganization public hearing this week, that was clarified.
At that meeting, a worry was that even with reorganization parents still can’t choose to have their children attend which school they wanted to.
Nancy Weingarten said she’s talked to several families that would like to take their children from Pemetic and send them to Bar Harbor, providing transportation themselves.
The district instead would have defined attendance zones to keep the school populations stable.
“In order for a student to go to another school, we’d still have to be a superintendent’s agreement,” Zboray said.
In Tremont, Jewett clarified her question, “I mean not moving kids, maybe I didn’t say it the right way, but like combining schools, this has to happen?”
“No, it doesn’t. I have looked into this. It does not have to happen. You have to go through a similar process as this to get to that point. So, we could build the structure, tomorrow, that says, ‘we want to combine Tremont and Southwest and we think this would work. We want to include Swans Island and Frenchboro. Okay, so this is what we want to do.’ But, you have to go through the same similar process to do it,” Thurlow said.
Stewart responded that “the state has a mandated process.”
“But not this?” Jewett asked.
Thurlow said, “You do not have to include this.”
“I wasn’t saying that you have to do exactly, but you would have to go through a process,” Stewart said. “You wouldn’t have to come up with this exact outcome, but the state has a set of parameters they would require.”
“This plan does not have to be enacted in order to move forward,” Thurlow reiterated.
Harper then made a motion “that the board not recommend passage of the school reorganization plan that will be placed on the November 3rd special town meeting warrant.”
Jewett seconded Harper’s motion and it passed unanimously.
SOUTHWEST HARBOR PUBLIC HEARING
Southwest Harbor’s Select Board hasn’t formally voted to endorse the plan or not, but it held one of its required public hearings, September 23, where Zboray again presented and board members and few members of the public asked questions at the sparsely attended meeting.
Zboray explained the initial tax impact to residents of the town, which are different for each town.
In Southwest Harbor, he said, the individual taxpayer would have a decrease in the amount they pay for education.
“For example, a $450,000 house, current taxes to education are $2,802. The new RSU would be $2,552, a $250 savings. For a $650,000 house, your current tax to education is a little over $4,000. With the new RSU, would be $3,686, a savings of $361. And for a $750,000 house, your current tax would be $4,670, and under the new RSU, would be $4,253, a $417 savings,” Zboray explained.
That happens even with the existing capital debt for a new school in Bar Harbor and school improvements for Mount Desert.
“Because in our plan, we say that to be a really functioning RSU and to allow everyone to gain from the promise of an RSU, we need to accept all that debt,” Zboray said. “And per $100,000 in Southwest Harbor, it’s $50.76. And that’s already built in. So those annual savings that I said have that already built into it. So even with the debt that we would be absorbing as an RSU, you’re still saving money.”
The town reserves for Southwest Harbor would be gaining back $306,000 of the special education reserve, he said.
The town’s allocated reserves of $73,000 in the bus reserve; $108,000 in maintenance, and then you add $75,000 of that for the playground reserve goes into the RSU.
Fiscal responsibility was a point of contention during the meeting. Weingarten worried that the plan lacked long-term budget projections.
“I’m part of a group of people who are in this town who are extremely concerned about property taxes rising and money and budgets and all of that,” Weingarten said. “I’d like to see the spreadsheets showing budgets for the next few years, the estimated budgets. I’ve asked this before.”
Zboray said that variables (staffing, enrollment) keep them from putting out reliable projections.
“I would say it wouldn’t be a good idea to propose, let’s say, three-year budget when you don’t know what your staffing is going to look like,” Zboray said. “I would be basically throwing numbers at the wall.”
“The idea is that you could certainly build spreadsheets for worst case, middle case, and best case,” Weingarten continued. “There’s no question you could take numbers and you could do projections. You just haven’t. And there are a lot of people and there’s a number of people in this town who, without looking at all of this, have watched our school budget here, you know, double in nine years, which is 8% a year if you average it out.”
Vice Chair Natasha Johnson looked at town’s valuations and net values and how she thought each might be impacted by the plan, focusing on assessments, and debt services part of the plan requiring ownership transfers to the RSU.
Susan Allen, a member of the RPC and former school committee member said, “I’ve just never heard of calculation or an assessment having anything to do with debt service.”
Johnson said that though there were awesome things about the plan her job was to look at the numbers without emotion as a select board member.
“I wanted to throw those numbers out there also, because, to me, it’s like if you’re asking all of us to venture into a larger relationship financially, then what could that look like when you come to the table, almost like a merger of two checkbooks, or four checkbooks, with your assets and your debts, or when people get married and they come up with a prenup, right? What does it look like when you all come together?” Johnson asked.
“Bar Harbor and Mount Desert, they have their renovations, building projects done before we became an RSU,” RPC member Cindy Lambert said. “The other schools are going to have building projects after we become an RSU. So those values—whatever the debt service is for those—is going to be added after we become an RSU. So, we don’t know how much those are going to be. So, we can’t add them into your equation now because we don’t know. But they’re going to be there in the future when the RSU looks at it.”
The formulation of that proposed board structure based on the MDI High School model was also a worry for some. That model was chosen and tweaked because its simple, already followed, and would give some of the smaller towns like Trenton a voice.
“I don’t see a reorganization as an option. I see it as an inevitability. And I just keep, I keep telling people, this is an opportunity for us to be driving this bus,” Allen said. “We are volunteers who have spent a lot of time going over every facet of the proposal we put forward. We product tested it in the municipalities. We’ve made adjustments that we could legally. Does that still make sense to the the core values that we have ascertained from speaking to so many communities? And is this perfect? Probably not. Is it more perfect than the current arrangement? Definitely. And I feel like this is a stepping stone.”
She posed a question.
“Do we want to drive the bus or do we want to be dragged along behind it? Because I really feel like, you know, it took the high school 20 years to consolidate and people were dogged about their tribalism and all the ways it shouldn’t work,” Allen said. “But can we imagine the world in which we have four high schools on this island? I think it would be not great in a lot of different ways. So, I don’t think any of us on the committee are claiming that this is the most the amazing thing that is going to solve everyone’s problems tomorrow, but we feel like this is the best path forward to start the process of solving a lot of these smaller issues and for the sake of sustainability.”
THE BAR HARBOR CONVERSATION
The RSU conversations have been going on for months in preparation for that November vote in each of the current school communities.
Last week, at the Jesup Memorial Library, the planning committee tried another format and facilitator Kendra Rand put together four different voices on a panel. Each person held a different vote representing a level of support for the reorganization plan: Cindy Lambert (yes, teacher, RPC member), Bear Paul (leaning yes, former teacher), Kate St. Denis (leaning no, former teacher), Val Peacock (no, former teacher, founder of education service).
There were approximately 20 attendees, many were linked to school boards or schools throughout the island.
Like in Southwest Harbor, Zboray began the discussion with a bit of a parable and then said he doesn’t see the conversation about fixing one school or taking something away from another.
“An RSU allows us to change the equation,” Zboray said. It allows people throughout the schools to ask: “What can we provide when we put our resources together?”
He also gave a current example of how the system is restrictive.
Currently there are ten school boards, nine budgets and inter-lapping school bus runs and just three speech and language pathologists who only work within the school they were hired by. Some kids in the other five schools have to use Huddle Up, which is online. As they search for others to fill those positions, the schools could reorganize the coverage to make sure those younger kids get human help early on.
Each panelist explained their positions through guiding questions. The first of those was if the community should vote yes.
“We should support the approval of the RPC’s recommendation,” Lambert said, stressing that the committee has been working on it for more than two years and had more than 12 community forums. They took that feedback and revised the plan and developed it to present to the state.
“There was a lot of discussion and a lot of thought was put into developing that plan,” Lambert said.
Lambert continued, “It helps students. It helps taxpayers in Bar Harbor and all of the towns. It helps teachers and it helps all the communities themselves.”
“It creates a system that expands opportunities,” Lambert said.
All the schools have really good things going for them. The RSU, she said, would bring things that are happening well at individual schools to all of the schools.
Like Zboray, Lambert also mentioned rigor and how the plan would help across the towns for students’ readiness levels for high school.
She spoke generally of efficiencies to reduce overall cost including administrative, billing, grants, larger size increases for the possibilities of grants, bulk purchasing, and service contracts.
“We do have problems with staff shortages” she said. Some schools haven’t had a science teacher for half a year, need ed techs, and custodians and bus drivers.
For Paul, his hope, he said, would be that a reorganization would allow the island to reorganize for all of the island’s community. He started his career as a special education teacher. He doesn’t worry about the loss of resources for his kids at Conners Emerson.
“I think we’ll get a clearer picture of the entirety of the need,” and his hope is that organizing as one district would allow them to be more nimble with the resources, he said.
In terms of tax and property tax and ownership of capital, it makes sense to him that the district would absorb it.
Having a larger pool of resources, he agreed with Lambert and Zboray, helps address larger needs.
“I don’t think the shortages are going to go away,” he said. “I’m a yes until I see something that makes me think no.”
St. Denis, though a leaning no, is leaning no with what she says are a “lot of contradictions.”
“I’m a strong advocate of an RSU. We need to make significant changes. I’m not convinced the ones proposed are in line with what we need,” St. Denis said.
She wants a systemwide middle school and the plan could be a first step toward that, but it is not included in the plan.
“I think the plan proposed can hobble us,” she said because the proposal says it won’t currently reorganize the schools. No school could be closed. No school would be grades 1-4 instead of K-8.
Overlaying structures are also a worry for St. Denis. School boards are taken away. Instead there are advisory councils. The new governing body and its representation is built off the high school structure.
“This is very different from the high school structure because we’re not talking about one building,” St. Denis said.
Peacock said that her opinion was not a reflection of the quality of the work or the people who created the plan, which she said was good work.
“I do think there are huge issues with what’s going on in the AOS right now,” Peacock said, including the number of meetings that Zboray has to attend.
However, there are financial impacts when it comes to budgets and property taxes for Bar Harbor.
“These decisions have real impact for taxpayers,” she said. “People have to pay taxes and it affects whether they can live here or not.”
She taught at Sumner High School during the reorganization there and was a resident of Lamoine when it chose to leave the RSU. For 14 years, she’s worked in her nonprofit that works in schools.
Rural schools, she stressed, are the heart, drain, catapult, and catalyst of community.
“This comes back to this sense of angst and anxiety, about our sense of the world,” Peacock said.
What is the loss that happens when you take decision making one step away from where the kids actually are, she asked. How do you increase home rule?
“The answer to that for me isn’t to make things further away; it’s to dig in and make things closer,” Peacock said.
The current governing process gives agency to towns and closer decision making.
“Decision making is getting further and further away from the things that are the most important to us,” she said.
She worries that the plan would create a system that people would have to work against to maintain decision making and agency, let alone cultivate more of it.
During budget processes as they currently work, there becomes a negotiation and a conversation that isn’t easy, but hashes out the values, she said.
In Bar Harbor, that happens during budget time for the council and the school board and warrant committee when Dr. Heather Weir Webster, the principal of the Conners Emerson School, presents.
“I’m really nervous about going to one huge committee” that governs all, taking out that piece, Peacock said. That creates a loss, she explained. There’s a loss of flexibility. The bigger you get—the bigger the contracts get—the harder it is to change them, she said, and meet the individual means.
Equity between communities doesn’t just happen by reorganizing. There needs to be a plan and a goal.
“What’s really going to change to have equity happen in those schools?” she asked. Often, she said, the lack of nimbleness and distancing of budgeting and governance. doesn’t allow for equity communities are looking for.
Peacock also said, “There are ways you can share resources without being a shared organization.”
“To share a teacher, that means you’re hired by both schools,” Lambert said. This happened to her. An RSU would preserve seniority for teachers without making them probationary, she said.
During public discussion, those gathered who were mostly associated with various island school boards talked about how small class sizes aren’t necessarily good for kids and spoke to “tribalism” on the island.
One dad with students at Conners Emerson asked what would immediately change for his kids if this passed.
“Really, to start with, there’d be no change for them,” Zboray said and added that when they get to the high school, they’d be with more kids at similar levels.
Ruth Poland, a teacher at the high school said that she’s strongly for it, and it feels like a door opening to many, but for some it feels like a door closing.
LINKS TO LEARN MORE
Tremont Select Board Moves School Reorganization Vote to November Ballot.
RPC “A Unified Future” slide deck
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