March 28, 2024
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SAD 31 directors at odds over building

HOWLAND – As the SAD 31 board of directors legally appealed the State Board of Education’s denial of its plan to build a new $8.9 million secondary school and directors pondered renovating Penobscot Valley High School, some of their own felt they were missing the point.

“It’s not about building a building,” Director Michael Pearson said after a board meeting on Wednesday night. “It’s about whether you can afford the building once you have built it.”

Pearson, who represents Enfield, complained with Directors June Grey of Enfield and Noreen Schorey of Burlington that other directors were not considering the finances of rebuilding or renovating the school.

Sen. Elizabeth Schneider, D-Orono, also warned the board against obsessively holding to one course. She encouraged directors to inundate themselves with worst-case scenarios in discussing renovating PVHS because she feared that directors “haven’t been exposed to them” enough.

“I think there are some people here who are very passionate about hanging onto the school,” Schneider said.

Directors should regard SAD 67’s inability to pass a $10.5 million budget on its third try as a warning, Schneider said.

The board is considering all options, Chairman John Neel said. He didn’t expect a decision to be made until next month.

Pearson and Schorey pressed Neel and interim Superintendent Jerry White to invite Jim Rier, policy director of the state Department of Education’s Management and Information Systems Office, to explain projections that showed an increase from $3,818 to $6,446 in district per-pupil costs by the 2009-10 school year.

“I can’t help but think that any intelligent decision would be predicated,” Pearson said, upon Rier’s information.

Neel and White said they are working on inviting Rier to a meeting.

Rier’s projections were a major component of the state board’s 7-2 vote denying concept approval of the new school Oct. 12. Board members cited the project’s expense, declining state enrollment projections and a resultant vast increase in district resident per-pupil costs. They urged SAD 31 to consider consolidating with another SAD.

From 1995 to the 2004-2005 school year, enrollments have dropped from 819 to 655 students while school tax assessments have climbed from $1.9 million to $3.1 million, according to statistics provided by former board Chairwoman Beth Turner, who served SAD 31 for 14 years and who represents it to the Northern Penobscot Region III school board.

Per-town local assessments have increased on average about 120 percent from 1995 to 2006, Turner said. Burlington went from $131,763 to $346,767; Edinburg from $41,382 to $98,309; Enfield from $1.1 million to $1.6 million; Howland from $313,864 to $667,614; Maxfield from $31,606 to $78,078; and Passadumkeag from $189,178 to $281,334.

Overall, SAD 31 budgets have climbed from $4.79 million to $6.81 million, said Turner, who got the statistics from the state and SAD 31 offices. Pearson and Turner said they feared that a new or renovated school would cost more to run.

“I want to be able to have all the options on the table so that we can look at all of the information and find the best education solution for the students of SAD 31,” Turner said Thursday.


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