Draft for MDI schools similar to current plan

BAR HARBOR – Municipal and education officials on Mount Desert Island are working on a school reorganization plan that would result in a new governance structure and membership that largely resembles the one they have now, according to island school board members.

The plan is expected to preserve the degree of local control that MDI towns have over their schools now, including the control that each individual town has over its local elementary school. Losing this control was a major concern when the state, looking to cut millions of dollars in school administrative costs, mandated in January that school districts consolidate. But area school board members said this week that the likelihood that the new local district won’t be much different from the old one does not mean they are indifferent to the effects of the new law.

“I think it’s a workable plan,” Gail Marshall, a school board member in Mount Desert and chairman of MDI’s Reorganization Planning Committee, said Wednesday. “I think it’s a lousy law.”

“None of us love this law,” Bar Harbor School Committee member Paul Murphy said.

The committee met Wednesday evening at the high school to go over the reorganization plan, a draft of which is due at the state Department of Education by Dec. 1. With about 1,500 students, MDI would exceed the 1,200-student minimum requirement the state has set for the new RSUs.

According to the plan, MDI would have one board that is responsible for all the schools in the district, to be known as a regional school unit, or RSU. The board would have weighted representation for each member town so as to reflect accurately the differences in population between each member town.

Bar Harbor, the most populous town on MDI, would have six seats on the RSU board while each of the other MDI towns would have three apiece. The offshore island towns of Cranberry Isles, Frenchboro and Swan’s Island, which because of their remote locations are entitled to certain exemptions from the state consolidation law, each would have one.

The RSU board then would delegate oversight of each town’s elementary school to its members that are from that town, which would function as a subcommittee on the RSU. Decisions that pertain only to that elementary school, such as how to maintain the building or how staff should be assigned, will be handled by RSU members from that town.

School administrators say the MDI towns in Union 98 already have consolidated many of their functions, which essentially would be managed as they are now. Elementary schools would continue to have identical curriculums, schedules and policies, and teachers would continue to abide by the same, islandwide collective bargaining agreement.

“The practical consequence [of reorganization] will be the same,” Brian Hubbell, a Bar Harbor school board member, said this week. “We have been operating more and more regionally toward a goal of islandwide education.”

Marshall said after Wednesday’s meeting that she sees no reason the proposed plan wouldn’t be accepted by the state. She said that if it is not, the towns on MDI could stand to lose some of the education subsidy they get from the state.

But MDI is considered a “minimum receiver,” which means it gets some money for special education but that’s about it, according to Marshall. Other towns or districts are more dependent on state subsidies for their operating expenses. The state subsidies those other towns stand to lose by consolidating with larger districts, Marshall said, put them at more of a disadvantage by consolidating.

Though MDI’s new school district may end up looking familiar to the existing Union 98 structure, there has been one negative consequence of having to develop the reorganization plan, according to Marshall. For the past year, the effort has taken up most of the local union administrators’ time, she said, which could have been better spent on actual educational issues.

“Their ability to be educational leaders is compromised,” Marshall said. “I’d rather not be doing this.”