Carrie Jones

just now

MOUNT DESERT ISLAND—The proposal to consolidate schools in the Mount Desert Island region failed, November 3 when the voters of Tremont voted against it.

If just one of the five larger towns’ voters involved—Bar Harbor, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor, Tremont, Trenton—did not approve the proposal, it would not pass.

That’s exactly what happened Tuesday when voters in Tremont voted 525 against and 361 in favor of reorganization.

The plan to reorganize how the island area’s schools are administered was developed through a multi-year process by the School Reorganization Committee, which is comprised of school board members and other representatives from island area towns.

The vote on the plan had been postponed twice as the plan was tweaked and changed and explained to voters and officials in public meetings.

The state-approved plan would take each individual school district in each town, dissolve it, and unify them into one single regional school unit called an RSU.

The plan would have created a unified governing structure, was meant to allow more movement of staff between schools, less redundancies, and more equity of student services. It also shared debt and reserves from each town to the system as a whole, transferred town buildings and land away from individual towns to the school district, and changed the budget process each town takes for its school budgets.

Proponents of the plan said that it would help put all students from all towns on a more even playing field before heading to the unified high school and cut administrative redundancies. Opponents worried that it would decrease local control, particularly around budgets and management. Others worried about the amount of seats each town would have on the governing board and how voting would work to elect representatives to those seats. Some were against the plan because they felt it did not go far enough and did not include a combined middle school in this iteration.

In Frenchboro, one of the first towns to report its votes, the school reorganization question passed 12-10.

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