Group weighs fate of Thomaston school

THOMASTON – Faced with shrinking enrollment, Georges Valley High School will begin looking for a partner to join forces in improving the SAD 50 school.

If no teammate is found by January 2007, SAD 50 should go it alone, according to the results of a task force study.

Either way, the Georges Valley High School Future Options Task Force has recommended the district find alternatives for improved education and the aging high school as its enrollment steadily declines.

By 2010, enrollment is expected to shrink from this year’s 331 students to 247 students.

For schools with fewer than 300 students, the state does not provide financial assistance for new school construction or improving existing buildings. The current school was built in 1963. A reduction in students also equates to fewer educational opportunities.

“We laid out the options as a point of beginning,” task force chairman David Emery said last week. “If we bring assets together in one place, it makes the educational experience more robust and cost-effective.”

Where the district goes with the task force recommendations is up to the school board and residents. The task force was assisted in its $16,500 study by Planning Decisions of Hallowell and the Mitchell Institute of Portland, according to SAD 50 Superintendent Judith Harvey. The results were outlined during a Dec. 7 public forum.

An obvious partner is SAD 5’s Rockland District High School, Emery and Harvey said.

In past years, the neighboring districts have whispered consolidation but have never really acted on it. Now, they are expected to meet sometime in January, Harvey said, to talk about various options.

A new concept in consolidation dubbed the Many Flags-One School option also is on the horizon.

Many Flags-One School would bring together Georges Valley, Midcoast School of Technology in Rockland, branches of Kennebec Valley Community College, University of Maine’s Hutchinson Center in Belfast and Thomaston Campus, and Washington County Community College’s boat program, under one roof, local consultant Alan Hinsey has said.

“I think it’s an exciting concept to think about,” Harvey said of that option, but it’s up to district residents. “As superintendent, I think it would benefit students.”

The task force says the Many Flags-One School coalition would create resources for Georges Valley High School students that would be unparalleled in Maine. Students would be offered an “array of opportunities for technical courses, for advanced placement courses, for college courses, for meeting and learning from talented seniors and retirees.”

In studying other schools, the 10-member task force found that a high school needs at least 400 students to provide a rich and varied academic program for optimal learning, unless the community has a very large industrial and commercial property tax base.

Another major finding by the task force discovered high school renovations to make the building suitable for another 25 years would cost nearly as much as new construction, and neither would qualify for state assistance because of low enrollment. Therefore, renovation or new construction costs would be borne entirely by local taxpayers.

By joining with another school, such as SAD 5, the district would have several advantages:

. A sufficient school size to support a diverse and rich academic program.

. Per-student cost savings in the construction and operation of the new school.

. Greater likelihood of being accepted into the campuslike setting as is being proposed because more vocational school member towns would participate in the high school.

. The possibility, not assurance, of state assistance for construction because minimum size threshold would be met.

Yet some parents on the task force raised concern about the social compatibility of Georges Valley with neighboring schools; whether small, rural towns would get fair treatment; the nature of a cost-sharing formula; whether other districts share SAD 50’s education philosophy; and a variety of other factors, including safety and driving distance.

The Many Flags-One School concept is one way the school could enrich learning for its students, the task force report states, but the complexity of such an endeavor for funding and approval by multiple organizations “leaves some task force members worried that GVHS could waste [time waiting] for a big dream that might never happen.”

Regardless of the direction district residents choose to go for improving its facility, the task force recommends that new teaching philosophies and methods begin now.

“Through visits to new schools, presentations by educators, and the reading of state and national educational studies, the task force has become aware of the new kinds of teaching methods and models used in state-of-the-art high schools,” the report says. “There is no need to wait until a new building arrives to implement such ideas. Therefore we urge the board and administration to pursue such reforms with the assistance of the Mitchell Institute, Gates Foundation and other resources.”