Residents challenge proposed SAD 31 school

ENFIELD – Saying an $8.9 million proposed SAD 31 secondary school will cost more than taxpayers can bear, a group of residents from Enfield, Passadumkeag and Burlington is petitioning the state to halt the school’s construction and advocating merging high schools with SAD 67.

The group, co-organizer Stephen Grey said Tuesday, feels that Enfield shoulders the largest portion of taxes for SAD 31 and that taking on the new school’s cost, plus its anticipated $1.5 million annual operating cost, would be detrimental to Enfield and other towns, such as Burlington and Passadumkeag. Residents from those towns are also in the group.

“The school system can’t afford what’s going on right now, never mind building the new school,” group member George Collins of Enfield said Tuesday. “That’s our point: that Enfield is not going to be able to handle this.”

With the new school, Grey sees SAD 31’s task as impossible.

“We cannot afford to provide the best possible education for our students, properly maintain the building, and be fiscally responsible to all taxpayers of the district,” Grey said Tuesday.

The group has more than 75 petition signatures since starting Saturday, and hopes to have considerably more when the Maine Department of Education meets next month to consider granting concept approval for the new school, Grey said.

SAD 31 school officials released a concept proposal for the new building in February. They said that if the project is approved, the “community center” will be open 24 hours a day, seven days a week, and will offer child day care, senior citizens programming, integrated job training with local businesses for students and job retraining and education for adults while being a school for seventh- to 12th-graders.

The project remains on the state’s construction list, with the state expected to pay a major portion of the project’s cost. Cost estimates have fluctuated as the building’s design has changed, going from $4.5 million to $6 million to the present figure.

School advocates maintain that a new building is overdue. A previous attempt to build a school stalled in the design phase in 2002. The present Penobscot Valley High School, in Howland, was cited as a substandard facility by the Commission on Public Secondary Schools at the New England Association of Schools & Colleges Inc., which has recommended to the NEASC board of trustees that PVHS be placed on probation.

SAD 31 board Chairman John M. Neel said Tuesday he was aware of the petitioners efforts, but didn’t believe they represented the will of the majority of people in SAD 31, which serves Burlington, Edinburg, Enfield, Howland, Maxfield and Passadumkeag.

Neel conceded that the school system has had some funding problems, but believes that the community center concept will give the new school an added value to the entire community that will outweigh its price tag.

“What’s the alternative? A new school is the best solution for our problems,” Neel said Tuesday. “We have a whole generation of students who don’t know what it is to go to a ‘normal’ [not substandard] school. We owe them this opportunity.”

Until the state’s new funding formula is completed, no one knows exactly how much of the burden of building the new school will be passed along to SAD 31 taxpayers, Neel said.

Merging with SAD 67’s Mattanawcook Academy in Lincoln will give SAD 31 students an opportunity to go to a good, academically advanced school, said Norma Priest, 44, a member of the petition group.

“That would work out to be a win-win situation for both school systems. We would be coming in with more money into the 67 system, the system at 67 has more programming than we have, and with the influx of students, they could put in even more programming and be able to hire more teachers and have a lot more to offer people,” Grey said.

Neel disagreed.

“I think the voters should decide whether we should have a new school or not,” Neel said.

Priest said she believes the state will push an increasing amount of the construction burden onto local taxpayers in an effort to force them to seek mergers with other school systems rather than maintain independent school administrative districts.

The petitioning group, which lacks a formal name, also fought for a high school merger with SAD 67 several years ago. It is a polar opposite to the PVHSOS group of residents from Howland that believes PVHS should stay in Howland and has fought hard to build a new secondary school.