Benedicta debates closing school

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BENEDICTA TOWNSHIP – Faced with decreasing enrollment and increasing costs, people in this small southern Aroostook County community have been debating quietly for the past five years whether to keep their school open.

The number of students is half what it was 15 years ago, and an expensive roof project under way has some people asking questions.

Reid Stanley’s children attended the school, and he has several nieces and nephews there now. He questioned if the roughly $400,000 being spent on the new roof is worth it to keep five teachers and a couple of dozen pupils there.

“Is this just another shining example of wasteful spending or is something else going on there?” he wondered last week during a telephone interview. “There seems to be something in the background.”

Shelley Lane has taught at the school for 15 years, the last five as principal. During those years, she said, she has seen enrollment fall from an average of about 22 pupils in each of three combination classes to between 30 and 40 pupils in the whole school. Next year, officials expect enrollment to be 30 pupils in prekindergarten through fifth grade.

Despite that, it has been Lane’s experience that the majority of parents still want to keep the school in Benedicta.

“They seem to lean toward liking the small, country school,” she said. “It’s an atmosphere where they can come in and see their child at work as well as see the teacher.”

It was, in fact, the desire to preserve the local school that prompted residents in February 1987 to vote 53-10 to deorganize the 152-year-old town, allowing the state to take over the school.

“Two hundred twenty-five people were pressed to pay more and more money to support the school,” said Dr. Martin Hrynick, who lives in neighboring Herseytown Township and has had two children in the Benedicta school. “This town voted itself out of existence and the promise was that the school would be preserved.”

Richard Moreau, superintendent of schools for the state’s Unorganized Territories, said the problem is that not only is it expensive to run schools in the Unorganized Territories, but the traditional funding mechanisms aren’t there either.

“You’re offering a comprehensive school program and you’re doing it for a small number of pupils,” he said recently. “When you do that, your costs are going to skyrocket.”

What is more, all education funding is raised from local taxes in the territories. There is no state aid to education as there is for municipalities and school administrative districts.

“There’s the kicker,” Moreau said. “[Education] is entirely self-funded.”

For the 1999-2000 school year, it cost $293,000 to operate the school in Benedicta for 33 pupils, according to Moreau.

Stanley said, however, that cost isn’t the only concern. As enrollment drops, many parents, he said, think it now would be better to have their children go to school in neighboring SAD 25, where they could be involved with more of their peers.

“This town has been removed from the mainstream for years,” he said. “Some parents would now like to have their children move into the mainstream.”

Children in sixth through 12th grades from Benedicta and nearby Silver Ridge already go to school in SAD 25 on a tuition basis. Last year, that tuition cost almost $4,600 per pupil for middle school pupils and more than $5,700 each for high school students. There were 40 Benedicta pupils in the district for the 2000-2001 school year.

Charles Pease, superintendent of schools for SAD 25, said there have been “several requests” from parents of children in the Benedicta school about having their children attend schools in his district.

One of them is Kim Lane, whose son will be the only pupil in kindergarten at Benedicta next year. Though he will be in with prekindergarten and first-grade pupils, Lane said she doesn’t like the idea that he will be the only one in his grade level.

“I don’t want him to go by himself,” she said, adding that she has appealed to the state – so far unsuccessfully – to have it pay her son’s tuition costs to SAD 25.

She said she can’t see why that’s a problem since the buses already go to SAD 25 anyway. Closing the school would be considerably cheaper.

“I think they’re wasting a lot of money when there’s no need of it,” she said, adding that she and her husband probably will move so their son can go to school in SAD 25.

Sue Robinson of Silver Ridge Township echoed similar views. She said she tried unsuccessfully two years ago to have her children attend SAD 25, but became frustrated and gave up.

“[SAD 25] is just across the town line,” she said. “Socially, they’d be in with the rest of the towns.”

Two years ago Moreau met with residents of the Benedicta area to discuss the school roof project. He said he was prepared to recommend that the school be closed, but parents had other ideas.

“The vast majority who want it there were pretty vocal in expressing that,” he said. “The majority within the community wants to keep the local school.”

Martin Hrynick said closing the school would be a mistake.

“We’ve got a real good local school,” he said. “Historically, parents and others in the community have had some say in how the school was run.”

Because Benedicta and Silver Ridge are not members of SAD 25, they are not represented on that district’s school board. If the remainder of the children at the Benedicta Elementary School were to be sent to SAD 25, parents could lose all say on how their children are educated.

Hyrnick’s wife, Justine, summed up the issue not just for Benedicta, but any community that questions the future of its schools.

“There’s always going to be that question,” she said. “Some people are going to like it and some aren’t.”